Hammer of Witches by Shana Mlawski Page A

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 herrounded 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