Hammer of Witches

by Shana Mlawski

  I shrugged, not willing to agree with that one.

  “And he’s in trouble!” Jinniyah went on. “Why else would he come to your house the other night? He must need you for something — something important!”

  I placed my empty bowl of soup on the dresser, took the girl by the shoulders, and pushed her gently to the ground. “Even if that were true, how are we supposed to find him? Even the Malleus Maleficarum can’t figure out where he is. For all we know the man’s in Africa by now.”

  I was glad to see that my question had Jinniyah stumped. Unfortunately she was only stumped for three seconds. “That’s easy!” the girl said with a grin. “We’ll ask the Baba Yaga.”

  I frowned. This sounded like the beginning of another story, and I was getting sick of stories by this point. Being part of my own was about more than I could take.

  “She’s a Storyteller,” Jinniyah explained. “A very powerful Storyteller! The Baba Yaga’s so famous that people in Russia even make up stories about her. They say she’s an evil old witch, and Amir says she’s a kind of a ghul. You do know what ghuls are, don’t you?”

  “No . . .”

  “Arabian desert demons. The men live around cemeteries and dig up the graves to eat the corpses. And the women, the ghulah, lure men to the desert so they can eat them all up.”

  My face pulled itself back at the thought. “And you want to go visit one of these people?”

  Jinniyah nodded with vigor, sending black sparkles springing from her hair. “Oh, yes, yes, yes! The Baba Yaga knows the answers to all sorts of questions. She can see the past, the future. She’ll know where Amir is, easy!”

  Exactly what I was afraid of. I turned away from Jinniyah toward the closed window shutters. How could I tell her that I had no interest in finding Amir al-Katib, that I had liked the man a lot better when I thought he was dead — and not my father?

  On the other hand, a meeting with this Baba Yaga did sound tempting. A wise fortune-teller who could answer any question? Maybe it was exactly what I needed. Lately everything I knew as true was disappearing, melting away. What I needed most was answers, someone who could help me separate the truth from all the stories. A person who could tell me, without qualification or doubt, exactly what I needed to do.

  Jinniyah took one of my hands in both of hers. “Come see the Baba Yaga with me, Bal. Please?”

  I looked down at the girl and sighed. Oh, how could I say no to that guileless face, that hopeful smile? I took Jinniyah’s hand and led her toward the attic door.

  “So, ‘Bal,’ huh?” I said, smirking at her.

  The girl grinned back at me. “Baltasar’s too long.”

  “All right, but I’m going to have to call you Jinni.”

  Jinni made a face but didn’t seem too put out over it. “That’s what your mom used to call me.” Before my eyes the ifritah transformed into a human girl with curly black hair and the threadbare clothes of a peasant. And before I knew it, we were galloping down the inn’s staircase, pushing our way through the crowded tavern — where there was still no sign of Antonio de Cuellar — and bursting out onto the dusky pier.

  Outside the sky had changed to a lilac-indigo hue. Above the Santa María and its sisters, the first stars began to twinkle. Jinniyah stopped us short in front of the ships and raised her head to the sky.

  She started sniffing.

  I followed her lead but found I couldn’t smell anything at all — only the normal salty-fishy aromas of Palos’s port.

  “Is this some kind of genie thing?” I asked her.

  “I’m trying to find an entrance to the Baba Yaga’s house. People from all over the world always want to visit her and ask her questions about the future, but she lives very very far away. So the Baba Yaga created magic doors all over the world so people could come visit her more easily. There used to be a door in Palos that she created for Amir. But that was before . . .”

  Though Jinniyah trailed off, I knew exactly what she meant. She meant before Amir had trapped her in the necklace. Before he had abandoned us.

  But Jinniyah got over the thought quickly — much quicker than I did, anyway. “I can sense magic, you know,” the girl said, out of nowhere. “It makes my skin all prickly. Especially right here, on my nose.” She tapped the tip of her nose and went cross-eyed. “The entrances to Baba Yaga’s house are highly, highly magical, so it’s always easy for me to find one. In fact, they’re so magical, they even make me sneeze sometimes!”

  I chuckled through my own nose at the thought of Jinniyah sneezing her way through Palos, but quickly my face hardened. Not far away, three Malleus soldiers were gathered, holding spears, sharing information — searching. For me.

  “Whatever you’re doing, make it fast,” I said to Jinni.

  “Got her!” the girl cried, and she raced off through the port with me still attached to her.

  The girl scurried down the road and into the empty market, zipping this way and that with such certainty that an onlooker would have been sure that she was the Palos native. By the time we reached Amir al-Katib’s house, I hoped she’d take a second to pay her respects and catch her breath. Instead she darted forward even faster, propelling me on at speeds I hadn’t felt since being tied to the back of a horse. At least at this rate the soldiers would have a hard time keeping up with us.

  Jinniyah stopped us abruptly in front of a crumbling hovel not far from the edge of town. I bent over and gulped down as much air as I could. Drab, moth-eaten curtains covered the hovel’s tiny window, and tortured branches like chicken feet poked out from under the building’s grimy walls.

  “This is the entrance to the Baba Yaga’s house?” I said. I gave the hovel door a light knock. No answer. I tried again, knocking a little harder. This time the door yawned open to reveal a dark, cobwebbed room devoid of human presence.

  “Looks like no one’s home,” I said into the shadows.

  “Looks like,” Jinniyah said with the haughtiness of knowledge.

  “Well, we came this far. We might as well go inside and wait for her.”

  With a final glance at Jinniyah, I strode into the building.

  I was overwhelmed by a wall of heat — not the humid heat of Palos but the roasting heat of a fire. The door to the house slammed shut behind Jinni, and instantly the interior transformed. No longer were we standing in a dusty, empty hovel, but a cozy one-room cabin, walls bright with the orange light of a fireplace. About a million dripping candles covered the cabin floor, along with piles of books and scrolls and crumpled pieces of parchment. In the middle of the room sat a large table carved from a single piece of wood, and in the corner lounged a fur-covered bed.

  Impressed by the transformation, I stepped farther into the house, then flipped through one of the cabin’s many books. “Do you think the Baba Yaga will be back soon?” I asked Jinni.

  The cabin door immediately squealed the answer. A freezing gust of wind brushed up against the back of my neck from outside. That was when I saw her, a dwarf of an old woman made larger by the pile of scarves and shawls draped over her rounded back. The woman hobbled into the room with a gnarly oak cane. “Come in, come in,” the dwarf said as she shut the door behind her, letting a final gust of wind blow in from outside. The wind was biting cold, as if the woman had entered not from Palos in the summer but some far-off mountain town in December. I stretched my neck to see out the cabin’s only cloudy window, which was almost completely obscured by a pile of books. Sure enough, I could see no hint of the buildings of my hometown, nor could I hear crickets, nor could I see the sea. All I could see through the window was a gloomy pine forest and flurries of gray snow swirling through the trees.

  The dwarfish woman hummed in disapproval as she unbandaged the shawls from her head and neck. “I would have been here when you arrived,” she said, “if only you had arrived on time.” Pressing one of her bent hands against my back, she pushed me farther into the cabin, the tips of her nails pricking me through my tunic as she did. I
allowed the woman to push me forward; I moved as if walking through a dream. It was as if I had stepped into another fairy tale — but I wasn’t sure whether it was one about a helpful old wizard or an evil hag who gobbled up visitors.

  “Just like your father,” the old woman complained as she pushed me. “No sense of punctuality.”

  Her scolding broke me out of my trance. “How can I be late?” I said over my shoulder. “I’ve never even met you before!”

  In answer the woman wiped the bottom of her large nose with one of her curled fingers. She unwrapped the final scarf from her head, revealing white, corkscrewing hair that gave her the look of an elderly medusa. Sniffling, she motioned toward one of the chairs around her table and said, “Have a seat, have a seat.”

  I obliged, and she sat in the chair across from me, the dwarf with liver spots on her drooping cheeks. “Are you the Baba Yaga?” I asked her.

  “I see you brought the ifritah with you,” she answered, her voice both sympathetic and teasing. “You poor dear,” she said to Jinniyah. “Did Amir leave you behind again?”

  Behind me Jinniyah sat on the ground on her knees, focusing tearfully on a knot in the wood floor. “Please don’t say that,” I said in a low voice to the Baba Yaga. “She’s really sensitive about him. It hurts her feelings.”

  When the Baba Yaga laughed, her neck inflated like a frog’s. “Feelings! What feelings? That girl is a figment, my boy! A mere wisp of air, a daydream! Oh, I’ve no doubt she’s told you she’s a genie. But she’s not even that. A half-genie. Half-human. Can’t even grant her own wishes.”

  The witch’s voice was so mocking, so easily cruel, that I shot right up from my seat. And before I knew what I was saying, I heard myself shout, “Well, you’re not anything special, you jealous old witch!”

  Regret immediately took me by the throat and pushed me back down in my chair. Why had I done that? The woman sitting in front of me was supposedly a master of Storytelling. Who knew what awful spell she was about to cast on me?

  But the crone’s sea-green eyes merely flashed at me. “‘Jealous’?” she repeated, carefully weighing the word. “Interesting. Young men usually ask me to answer their questions, not the other way around. Tell me, boy. What is it, exactly, that I am jealous of?”

  I didn’t know what would be worse: to answer or not to answer. I glanced back at Jinniyah, cleared my throat, and mumbled, “Her youth.”

  The Baba Yaga’s eyes became narrower, and the thin line on her face ticked up into a wide, evil V. “So you are clever, son of al-Katib. Take care that your cleverness is not your ruin.”

  In punctuation, a strong gust of wind threw open one of the cabin’s windows and brushed away the light of the nearest candles. “There is a story from my village about cleverness,” the Baba Yaga said. “It is about a king who had three daughters, and on their thirteenth birthday, he asked each of them to make a wish. The first daughter, a raven-haired girl, wished for beauty, and she grew up to be the most beautiful woman in the land. The second daughter, a fair-haired girl, wished for love. When she was older she married a prince and had many children, each of whom loved her more than anything in the world.

  “But the third daughter, the scarlet-haired child . . . she was like you, son of al-Katib. She wished for cleverness. When she was older people would come from all over the kingdom to ask her questions, and she would always have the perfect answer for them.

  “One day a prince came from afar, seeking a bride. Every woman he met he would ask, ‘Fair lady, what is the fastest thing in the world?’ Many beautiful women considered the question and gave answers such as ‘a horse’ or ‘an eagle.’ But the scarlet-haired daughter knew the real answer. ‘The fastest thing in the world,’ she said, ‘is the human mind.’ The prince married her then and there, and they enjoyed several happy years together.

  “Little did the scarlet-haired princess know that her wish had also been a curse. Soon she realized that, every time she was asked a question, a new wrinkle would appear on her face, and a new spot would appear on her skin. By the time she was married five years, she already looked like an old woman.

  “Her husband, the prince, was a wise man too. He knew it would not do for a king to have a crone as his queen. So he banished his wife to the forests, to a crumbling old hut where she would never be seen again. And the villagers called her names and told stories about her, and she became a wicked witch to live up to their stories.”

  It took a moment for me to understand what the woman was saying. Then, realizing, I said, “You were that girl.”

  The old woman removed one of her shawls from the back of her chair and wrapped it back around her shoulders. “You children! When you are young, oh, you ask so many questions! But as you age, you have fewer and fewer of them. Before long all you have is answers.

  “But those who wish to be wise are forever plagued with questions, questions that eat their flesh from the inside out. ‘How should I live?’ ‘Why must we die?’ ‘What is right, and what is wrong?’ Whether or not they look so on the outside, the wise age quicker than most, and their lives are filled with heartache.” The Baba Yaga adjusted her shawl around her. “You came here to ask me a question or two, I think.”

  I gulped down my fear and said, “Jinniyah said you’re a powerful Storyteller. She said you would know where Amir is, and where I need to go. To be honest I have no idea what I’m doing. I know I have to leave Spain. Diego said so. But I don’t know what to do next. I don’t —”

  “You are so like your father,” the crone said, bowing her head deeper into the candlelight. “I saw him a few weeks ago. He came in through the door in North Africa. He was much older this time. On the run. In search of direction.” The Baba Yaga reached under the table. “I used the tarot.” The old woman brought up a deck of decaying cards from the floor and spread the cards faceup in front of her. Spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts . . .

  “Playing cards?” I said, disbelieving. “I thought Jinniyah said you were a Storyteller.”

  The Baba Yaga gathered the cards in a neat stack and placed it in the center of the table. “The cards tell a story, son of al-Katib. If you know how to read them properly, you can summon images: of what has passed, of what you seek, of what will befall you in times to come. Over the centuries Storytellers have consulted the cards to discover the direction in which they must travel. Shall we consult them now, Baltasar ibn Amir?”

  The name sent a shiver dripping down my back. All the same I nodded. With shaking but nimble hands, the seer shuffled the deck of cards three times. Then she dealt the top card between us.

  “This is you,” she said.

  I examined the card. “It looks like the jack of spades.”

  “Impertinent boy. The jack of spades is a symbol. It symbolizes you.” She placed a curled hand on top of the card, which began to glow red underneath it. A near-transparent image flashed up above the card: a shadow in the shape of a young page striding toward an unknown future.

  “The jack of spades,” the Baba Yaga explained. “The symbol of a young man seeking information from afar.” The crone removed her hand from the card, letting the ghostly image fade above the table. “It also means someone who talks too much, doesn’t listen. Each card, you’ll see, has several significances.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Is one of those significances the jack of spades?”

  “One who talks too much,” the Baba Yaga repeated, leaving a hint of a smile on her withered face. She dealt a few more cards and placed both of her hands over them. The image of an opening book appeared between us. “An unknown past, recently revealed.” The image of the book swirled in the air and shifted into the shadow of a flame-haired girl. “New meet-ings,” — here the Baba Yaga’s gaze jumped to Jinniyah — “new losses.”

  The silhouettes of Diego and Serena darkened the air in front of me. They screamed in silence before shriveling into nothing.

  “Losses,” I repeated to myself. “So my aunt and uncle . .
. they’re . . . they’re definitely . . .”

  The Baba Yaga’s face filled with sorrow. “They have gone to a place you cannot follow.”

  I turned away from her toward the fireplace. Deep inside me I’d known it was true. But I’d been keeping a grain of hope they’d somehow escaped that fate.

  And now that grain was gone. For some reason I imagined Amir al-Katib cackling at the knowledge.

  The Baba Yaga removed another card from her pile — the eight of hearts — summoning the image of three ships racing across a choppy black ocean. “This is your present. The shedding of familiar things. A journey to an unknown land. This card is a heart, Baltasar: the suit of water and the west.”

  “A journey by sea to the west,” I said to myself. “So I was right to seek Antonio de Cuellar.” To the Baba Yaga I continued, “If that’s the story of my present, then what about my future? What about Amir al-Katib? And the Malleus Maleficarum! Even if I find Antonio de Cuellar and travel west, who knows if they’ll try and follow me? And what am I supposed to do once I reach Cathay? Will I be safe there? What language do they even speak in Cathay?”

  “You ask many questions, son of al-Katib, but never the right ones. The Malleus Maleficarum, Antonio de Cuellar — these are pieces in a much larger game. Your true quest is far more dire than you imagine. I do not need to read the cards to know that the winds are shifting. They move west, bringing with it a terrible force. A force more powerful than I have seen in my lifetime.”

  The ancient woman spread her hands over the meaningless arrangement of cards between us. The candles around us shrank and darkened, and the wind from the open window shivered across my skin.

  A black shadow towered over the playing cards, a horned colossus wearing a cape that billowed malevolently over the table. The horned man grinned as he picked up a globe and crushed it in his hands.

  “What does it mean?” I asked the Baba Yaga.

  “It is a prophecy,” the old woman said. “A great power travels west: a being who will destroy the world as we know it.”