Hammer of Witches Read Online Free PDF

cobblestones, covering them with an eerie golden mist. I paced back and forth through it, feeling my insides burn.
    Damn Diego, damn Gonzalo, damn my parents, damn the Jews! And damn myself most of all. I sat on the nearest barrel and and banged a fist lightly against my knee. A crumpled piece of paper stuck with mud to the sole of my shoe. It was a copy of the Alhambra Decree, signed by the king and queen in March of this year. “Knowing they are trying to subvert our Catholic faith,” one of its paragraphs began, “it is resolved that all Jews and Jewesses leave our kingdoms under penalty of death.”
    I crushed the page into a ball and chucked it at the nearest wall. Then I bent my head into my hands.
    Two shadows, long from dusk, spread over the golden puddles in front of me. “Good evening,” said a man’s voice, lean, dark, and oddly amused. I removed my hands from my head. Two figures waited in the entrance to the alley, blanketed by the shade of Amir al-Katib’s house. A cowl hid the face of the first man. A helmet hid the face of the other. The second man was decked in armor, and he carried a shining spear. Agents of the Inquisition, maybe. I didn’t want to wait to find out.
    Slowly I rose from my barrel. “We are looking for someone,” the cloaked man said. “A Baltasar Infante of Palos.”
    My fingers twitched at the sound of my own name. “I don’t know any Infante. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”
    I held back the tremors ready to race across my body so I could push my way past the two men. But the soldier swunghis spear in front of me, and I danced back to avoid its shining edge.
    “I’m sorry,” I repeated somewhat breathlessly. “But I really don’t know who you’re talking about! Listen, this is all some big misunderstanding!”
    “That is correct,” the cloaked man replied. “We know you are Baltasar Infante. And you will be coming with us. Now.”
    My horrified reflection stared back at me, warped in the soldier’s tarnished helmet. The cloaked man made a quick motion at the soldier, and I tried to make a run for it. The cloaked man caught me from behind by both arms. With all my strength I stomped on his foot and tried to wrest myself out of his grip. The man cursed but held on. The soldier swung the flat of his spear across the side of my skull. With stars in my eyes, I doubled over. The soldier rammed the dull end of his spear into my back, and I fell into endless darkness.

My body was pitched forward. I tasted some animal’s mane. Rain pattered against my back, reins rattled, and hooves clopped in my ears. Although it took my bashed brain some time to fit the pieces together, soon enough I understood.
    The men had put me on a horse.
    The top half of my body was slumped forward in a twisted position that squished my face up against the horse’s head. When I tried to move my arms, I found they’d been tied behind my back with a thick and splintery rope. “No need to struggle,” the cloaked man said behind me. He snapped our horse’s reins above my shoulders. “You’re not going anywhere, so you may as well enjoy the ride.”
    I was in no state to argue, so I lifted my aching head off the horse’s and squinted through the downpour. Already the landscape around us had changed. The sunny skylines of Palos and nearby Huelva had given way to barren, storm-swept marshes covered in unending night. Rain whipped down onus, strict and blinding, but I could distinguish the outlines of pines twisting toward the sky on either side of us. Every so often our horses would slosh through shallow black water, and tall, creeping reeds would brush against their haunches. In daytime, maybe, this land would be beautiful. But now, in darkness and rain, it was a world of nightmare.
    At last the cloaked man pulled our horse to a whinnying stop, and the soldier slowed his own horse beside us. In the distance we could see a jagged, moss-covered building that appeared to have grown out of the