Salem's Witches (Neitherlands Book 1), page 1
SALEM'S WITCHES
by Tizzy
A Neitherlands novel
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Edited by Nerine Dorman,
with additional help from Eduardo Baccarani and Joyce Guillen
Cover design and artwork by Diego Accorsi
Interior artwork by Ender Morales
Copyright © 2017 Tizzy
All rights reserved.
For Edgar,
Who was in my mind when I first tried to write this, more than fifteen years ago,
Who’s been in my mind constantly since,
And who was the first to believe in me.
Wherever fate has taken you, I hope you’re doing fine.
Miss you.
ACT ONE
A New Slant on Crime
1
On that winter morning, Dominion Square was silent, frigid, and full of petrified people.
Only one of those things was not like the others, and far less common even in New Wakilork, where crime ran rampant to the point of honesty being considered a flaw. Petrification was just not the kind of thing criminals went for. Nevertheless, there was a certain beauty to the scene, where hundreds of people seemed to be partying: Stony musicians played music to which their stony guests danced, while other stony people who hadn’t been blessed with the ability to dance sat by the main table and ate.
The relative peace was then disturbed by not one, but three most uninvited guests who hadn’t been taught about the rudeness of party-crashing.
Veronika was one of these guests and, as she stepped into the square, a mixture of curiosity and dread took over. Her companions, Sarah and Laura, walked in behind her. As usual in New Wakilork, no amount of caution was too much: In the city state people died unexpectedly in an instant if they lowered their guard at the wrong time.
She wished they’d been given more information about what was going on before being sent to investigate. Far too often, Salem would just tell them something had happened somewhere and leave it at that, denying them any details or even a hint at what to expect. He’d excuse himself, saying he didn’t know, but she doubted it: If he never knew what happened, he would have the worst informants in the whole city. This lack of knowledge had resulted in interesting results on numerous occasions, where they had been sent to investigate such things as bachelor parties gone wrong, grisly murders committed by a fanatic clown, and, on one occasion, agents of the Dominion itself running a smuggling ring. In all three cases they had ended up running for their lives while being chased by a crazy man wielding an axe.[1]
Veronika hoped their current case wouldn’t be a bloody one. The Midwinter Feast, celebrated the night before on this very square, had a tendency to go wrong and was known for devolving into the city’s biggest brawl. Many of those attending did so with that expectation, the bloody conflict being the main feature of the night.
She sighed in relief as she failed to find an axe-wielding madman. As tiring as it was for them to always be on their guard, crime was what New Wakilork excelled in, and it did so proudly.[2] Not only weren’t there any killers present, but there also was no blood anywhere. It was the cleanest crime scene she had ever seen, with nary an indication of a crime taking place at all.
Except for the strange statues, that is, although to her knowledge populating a public square with statues wasn’t a crime. It was just a weird thing to do, one done by highly eccentric and probably suicidal people, considering the expense and openness of such a display. This would cause all streets surrounding the square to become blocked by the sheer concentration of thieves who would be attracted. And then, once the author was discovered, the assassins would likely step in. Rich people always had heirs, and said heirs were more often than not all too anxious for the inheriting part to come.
She approached one of the statues while her two friends walked around. When she examined it up close, something caught her attention: The statue’s clothes weren’t stony. They were made of real fabric.
The food also wasn’t stony. It was real food, being eaten by people made of stone. Come to think of it, the musicians’ instruments were also real. It looked almost as if real people had been turned to stone while everything else remained in its natural state.
“This is impressive!” said Sarah, nearing a space containing several statues. The one in the center depicted an inebriated woman who had gone topless, obviously to thank the gods for her good looks. Several attendants stared at her, their mouths agape in what could be taken as horror if one wished to ignore other, likelier reasons for their amusement.
“I guess we can assume these statues used to be people?” said Veronika, staring at the grisly scene with the woman, men and debauchery. “Otherwise the guild of stonemasons really upped their game…”
“It was a warlock,” said Laura.
“Are you—” said Sarah.
“A warlock,” Laura repeated.
“But—”
“A warlock.”
“Can you at least tell me why it was a warlock?”
“Look at the crime scene, Sarah!” said Laura while Veronika listened, secretly hating Laura’s know-it-all tendencies. “Everyone in here was turned to stone. Can we at least agree, at first, that this was done with magic?”
“I…guess…”
“Good. Now, think about it. A whole party, turned to stone. Isn’t it…flashy? Well then, what kind of magic user is flashy like this? Tell me, Sarah. When you hear of a curse being cast upon people where the caster spares no expense and goes all out with a song-and-dance production that ends with something as noticeable and remarkable as this, who do you think of? The Coven?”
“Certainly—”
“The Coven wouldn’t do this kind of stuff. If anything, a disgruntled witch will turn whoever disgruntled her into a frog and leave it at that. No, Sarah, this wasn’t done by a witch. So ruling out the Coven, who else could?”
Veronika sighed and prepared to join the conversation, hoping to become the third voice to help end the argument. “Laura, perhaps a wiz—”
“Have you met any local wizards, Veronika?” Laura raised her voice. “The College of Wizardry of New Wakilork has never produced anyone capable of doing more than singeing their own eyebrows off.”
Veronika opened her mouth.
“And don’t talk to me about sorcerers! Yes, I know there are plenty of those where you came from, but there are none around here. Zilch. Zero. The College of Wizardry has made it a task to chase any sorcerers away. So yes, this is a warlock’s doing. Can we agree now?”
Veronika stared at Laura, who displayed the patience of a time-bomb whose clock had been running for far too long. And it was barely Monday morning.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she added.
“But what about a—” said Sarah, only to be met with a stern stare from Laura. “I mean, you know, deities are known for doing things like…” She lowered her voice. “Like this one.”
“Why would any deities do this, Sarah? Pray tell. Last time I checked, and I don’t know if you did your homework before coming, but I did, and this whole damn feast is made to honour the gods. Now why would they crash their own party?”
“Well, maybe…” Sarah said, but it was too late. Laura had wandered off to examine other statues.
Veronika tried to get Sarah to calm down for a moment, before resuming the investigation. “I know this looks like a warlock,” she whispered to her, taking advantage of Laura’s distance, “but if you look around you’ll notice the scene is lacking in—”
“Of course there’s terror in the scene!” Laura yelled from the other end of the square. “Just look at it, right here!”
Veronika ran towards Laura, while Sarah followed her closely. Two statues were staring at the floor. One looked shocked, while the other was aghast. The space between them, however, was just empty.
Laura dropped her arguing for a minute to, perhaps, try to discuss what the men had been staring at.
“They were obviously staring at the war—” said Laura, only to stop her self-aggrandising statement when the whole square got covered in a myst[3] that made it impossible for anyone to see anything farther away than their own noses.
For a moment or two nobody moved: Plenty were the tales of people trying to walk their way out of a myst only to get permanently lost in it. Nobody knew if they were true, for nobody came back from the myst, but most agreed it was better to not tempt fate and, when a myst arrived, just stay put until it passed.
Veronika felt a bustle around her as the flapping of what seemed to be all the birds in the city reached her ears. A clank then sounded from the empty space. She almost ran, afraid the myst had been conjured by a warlock who would try to kill them all for learning of his existence. She didn’t move because running in high heels was difficult enough when you could see anything; doing it during a myst was essentially suicide.
A few seconds later the myst left the square for better, friendlier places, and Veronika found herself able to see again. She was greeted by an almost impossible amount of black feathers covering the place. It looked as if someone had murdered a whole murder of crows. An instant later she remembered about the empty spot. She turned to find Laura there, kneeling and holding someth
A smug Laura got up and showed her a thin bar made of silver tied to a chain: an amulet. Veronika reached out to grab it when she realized yet another thing had changed during the myst.
The statues were gone.
That also explained why Sarah, instead of marveling at the magically appearing amulet, just stared around, aghast.
“Don’t mind me, I know nothing,” she said, “but I fear somebody may be playing tricks on us.”
The women got together, all three of them staring in wonder at the ridiculous amount of feathers and lack of statues. There was no denying something was up, but what could it be?
2
One could say New Wakilork has a certain degree of political complexity people might want to be aware of, but that would be akin to stating a tiger has a few stripes one might want to look for just to know whether to run away in panic. In truth, New Wakilork’s political climate is a jumbled mess of stripes of all types and colors that would make any tiger feel either proud or absolutely ridiculous.
Yet when it comes to tigers the stripes in the end don’t matter because, if you ever run into a stripeless tiger, it is still a tiger and you should run before it eats you. In the same vein, all political complexities and eccentricities in New Wakilork were for naught, because a woman who called herself the Dominatrix ruled over it with an iron whip and it was whatever she wanted or said what happened in the end.
She wasn’t new to the political game, as very few people remained who remembered a time when she wasn’t around. More remarkably, her ploy to take over the city involved not only memorizing the rules of the game, but carefully rewriting them while nobody else was watching and making sure none of the other players found out—until it was just too late and they were being used as crocodile chowder because the rules said so.
Her name was Madame Xantiplam, and everyone loved her, because there was a hefty price to pay for not doing so.
Nevertheless, one thing most residents of New Wakilork openly agreed upon was that, by removing any and all political actors from the stage, the Dominatrix had finally given the city state political stability. That the magical formula for political stability happened to be making sure there were no political elements at all to cause instability was one often discussed by scholars all over the Neitherlands.
She wasn’t happy.
But then again, Madame Xantiplam was seldom happy. Being happy wasn’t a part of her job description, and therefore she saw no reason to do it. Instead she chose to get angry over anything at all that went wrong, no matter how small. She also chose to fix most problems by introducing whoever was causing them to her ever-growing menagerie of beasts, and this often fixed whatever the problem was for good.
Her current problem wasn’t that simple.
She sat in her throne room atop Dominion Fortress, where meetings with highly ranked officers were held. Anyone who wasn’t a part of this tight group and who lacked friends in high places could only dream of ever speaking with the Dominatrix herself—not that many people wanted to, considering her track record when dealing with commoners.
The walls of the lavishly decorated room were filled to the brim with portraits depicting her as a complete success in pretty much any professions anyone could think of, barring those deemed unbecoming for such a paragon of virtue and good manners. As she gazed about her, she took a sip from a golden cup containing her most loved delicacy: cherries doused in sparkling wine. It was something she could both eat and drink, and that made it the best thing since sliced bread.
She had never quite understood what was so good about sliced bread. It was overrated.
She knew what everyone was thinking. It was something among the lines of “Madame Xantiplam is staring at all those portraits to remind herself that she’s always successful and therefore there’s a way out of this.”
They were wrong.
She cautiously disguising her gaze by staring at the paintings while she counted, out of the corner of her eye, how many people had attended the meeting and who each of them was. All of this was part of the delicate process of figuring out on whom to pin the blame for this disaster.
“Mister Gupitaaaaa!” she yelled when her inner voices deemed it the right moment to break the silence. Her voice was chill, raspy, and the kind of voice children all over the Neitherlands reported hearing during their worst nightmares.[4]
A diminutive man with a thin mustache approached slowly. He held a notebook and she could tell he was doing his best to not show he was trembling. His best was not good enough.
“We might have to investigate this, don’t you think?” she said, in her peculiar manner of asking questions that didn’t so much demand a positive answer as it did everything possible and then some to scare away any non-positive ones.
“If you so desire, your excellenc—”
“I know, we rarely ever bother investigating, but this one seems big enough, and I fear we won’t be able to put it to rest by blaming everything on some random person and calling it a day.” A collective sigh answered her. “However, we’ll need to tell people something in the meantime, won’t we?”
Mr. Gupita assented.
“We’ll need a lie. Where is our resident liar today?”
Mrs. Anderson, the Resident Liar,[5] raised her hand. It was nowhere nearly as shaky as everyone else’s, but then again she was good at lying. “I’m here, your Domination. And I’ve already planned all excuses we’re going to need to get out of this. You see, there’s false information making the rounds stating everyone in the feast was turned to stone, but that’s a lie. The truth is, your poor husband disappeared, see? Everyone else went home safely. We’re looking into what happened to Mr. Whatshisface, but in the meantime we need to ask you for strict secrecy. After all, spreading rumors or misinformation is a crime and you wouldn’t want to be judged for a crime while your husband is gone, or would you?”
Madame Xantiplam let out a grin scarier than the student debt of a recent graduate. She loved this woman and her ability to make up lies on the spot. She’d throw her to the alligators if that ability ever faltered.
“I love it. Thanks, Mrs. Anderson. Now, we have to—”
A second hand rose above the crowd, interrupting her. This one was noticeably shakier, weaker, and overall less good at lying to hide its own fear than Mrs. Anderson’s.
“Yes, Colonel Hover?”
“Excuse the interruption, your Domination.” Colonel Hover was the head of the Dominion Intelligence Enterprise,[6] and one of the best when it came to capturing anyone who dared plot against the Dominion. He was also a renowned coward who always seemed to be shaking. “But there’s something else we need to mind.”
“What is it?”
“It’s this investigation you want. It’s ludicrous. When has the city guard ever looked into anything? Having them investigate this is downright suspicious. It could even make the headlines!”
Madame Xantiplam stared at the man. There was some logic to his words; he had somehow found a flaw in her plan and managed to capture one of her pieces in the imaginary game of chess permanently taking place in her head.
She was the kind to flip the table when losing.
“Well, Colonel Hover, since you fancy yourself so—”
The main door opened of sudden in the rudest possible way. Doing such a thing called for capital punishment.
In came an older man wearing a white suit who walked with a cane. His tall, thin frame looked elegant, yet not enough to keep Madame Xantiplam from being annoyed at the interruption. Until she realized who it was.
“Desiderio Marcano,” said Madame Xantiplam while the man traversed the considerable distance between the entrance and her throne. “It seems to me you have arrived at our little meeting late, suddenly, and in a borderline illegal manner.”
“Then I must have arrived just as expected, your greatness.” Desiderio stood in front of the Dominatrix and had the gall to not tremble. She loved him for that. She also felt disrespected and wanted him dead, but he was too useful to kill. “And with me, of course, I bring information. The kind of information your regular informants are unable to give you.” A grunt roared through the room coming from seats filled with many not-too-useful ministers and other collaborators.
