Hammer of Witches by Shana Mlawski

lives we were like infants again.”
    I said, “You keep bringing up this ‘Malleus Maleficarum.’”
    “A renegade offshoot of the Inquisition founded in Germany. Both the Inquisition and Malleus Maleficarum were charged with protecting the purity of Christian Europe, but they do so from different angles and with different tools. The Inquisition, as you know, is tasked with rooting out secret practitioners of Judaism and Islam. And as for the Malleus Maleficarum. . . . Well, you know your Latin.”
    I ran a finger across the crumbling scarlet wax that had once sealed shut the priest’s parchment. The wax had been marked with a hammer. “Malleus Maleficarum — the Hammer of Witches,” I translated. “So the Malleus Maleficarum’s job is to find witches and kill them?”
    “That is correct.”
    The fiery letters burned through my memory. Ameth. Truth.
    “You mean witches . . . like me.”
    My uncle’s eyes twinkled behind their spectacles. “And me. And your Aunt Serena. And your father.”
    There was that word again. Father. Why did I taste bile whenever he said that word?
    “Is that why the priest last night called me lukmani?” I asked.
    My uncle clapped his hands on his knees. “He did, did he? I haven’t heard that word for a long time. I’ve always called us ‘Storytellers,’ but the meanings are about the same.”
    “Why Storytellers?”
    “Come now, Bali! You don’t think I told you all those stories for my health, do you? Not that I don’t like them, of course. I wouldn’t be a good Storyteller if I didn’t. But there was another reason too. I wanted you to be prepared, just in case. Perhaps I should have taught you to harness your powers when you were younger, but I didn’t want to risk raising suspicions with the neighbors.”
    Before he could continue, three huge bangs pounded at the front of our house. “What’s all this noise?” I heard my aunt announce from inside the kitchen.
    A man’s voice boomed back at her. “Open the door in the name of Their Majesties King Fernando and Queen Isabel!”
    “Did you say the king and queen?” Aunt Serena called back. “How nice! Just give me a moment to move this stew before it bubbles over. Then I’ll be right with you.”
    Diego glanced at my bedroom door. “I thought we had more time. The Malleus Maleficarum. For all their ranting about the sins of sorcerers, they always seem to have some magic up their sleeves whenever it’s convenient for them. Come, Bali. It’s time to go.”
    The old man helped me stand, but I felt like a golem who had come to life before the clay had set and had to grasp my headboard to support myself on wobbly feet. “What do you mean, ‘go’?” I said. “You just said we’re sorcerers. Let’s go out there and fight them!”
    My uncle breathed out some air in a kind of bleak chuckle, and his eyes went very wide. “No. They now know you are a Storyteller, which means they will have sent far more men than we can handle. And I will not risk your being captured again. Their methods of torture are too brutal to think about. They say they have perfected a way of drowning a man so that he does not die, only languishes in the agony between life and death, wishing that his lungs would burst. And they say —”
    But Diego could not continue. He closed his eyes briefly, shook his head, and stole a leather bag from beside his chair. He stuffed the priest’s parchment into that bag and thrust the thing into my hands. “You must go. There’s a coin purse in here, and the scroll you can finish reading later. Some of your aunt’s bread is in here too. Not enough for a long journey, but that’s what the coins are for.”
    “What journey? Where are we going?”
    “Not ‘we.’ You. Don’t worry about us. You just worry about running.”
    The banging at the front of the house was growing louder now, as was Serena’s scolding of the soldiers. “Run?” I said as if the word were unknown to me. “What do