Sensing the press of time, she hurried toward the archway.
By now, the others would have gathered below. She crossed under the painting of King John V, the Portuguese king who founded the library, and reached the steps that spiraled all the way down to the bottommost level of the library.
As she circled around and around the tight staircase, a low murmur of voices rose to greet her. Upon reaching the last step, she halted at a stout black iron gate. It had been left ajar for her. Fixed upon it was a sign that read PRIS?O ACADéMICA.
She smiled at the thought of a prison being built under a library. She pictured recalcitrant students or drunken professors being locked up down here. Once a part of the original dungeons of the royal palace, this floor had continued to serve as the university’s prison until 1834. Today, it remained the only existing example of a medieval prison in all of Portugal.
She slipped through the gate and into the dungeon. A good section of this floor was open to tourists, while other locked rooms were used as additional book storage. She headed toward the far side, where the modern age had infiltrated this medieval space. A new computer system had been installed in an unused back vault, including a system for digitizing books, offering a way to further safeguard the treasures stored above.
On this winter’s solstice, the computers would serve a new purpose—not to preserve the past, but to offer a glimpse into the future.
As she entered the back vault, a woman’s voice greeted her. “Ah, Embaixador Carson, you made it in time.”
Dressed in a crisp navy suit and white blouse, Eliza Guerra, the head of the Joanina Library, crossed over and gave Charlotte a peck on each cheek, along with a quick squeeze of her upper arm. Excitement all but bubbled through the petite librarian.
“I wasn’t sure I would make it,” Charlotte explained with an apologetic smile. “The embassy is short-staffed and in a state of chaos with the approach of the holidays.”
As the U.S. ambassador to Portugal, Charlotte had a thousand responsibilities this night, including catching a red-eye back to D.C. to join her husband and two daughters. Laura, her oldest, was back from Princeton—which was Charlotte’s alma mater—where she was pursuing a degree in biotechnology. Her other daughter, Carly, was more of a wild child, chasing a dream of a musical career at New York University, while also hedging her bet by studying engineering.
Charlotte couldn’t be prouder of them both.
She wished they could be here to witness this moment with her. They were one of the reasons she had helped found this organization composed of women scientists and researchers. The charitable foundation was an offshoot of the larger Coimbra Group, a union of more than three dozen research universities spread around the globe.
In an attempt to foster, promote, and network women in the sciences, Charlotte and the other four women gathered here had started Bruxas International, named after the Portuguese word for “witches.” For centuries, women who practiced healing, or who experimented with herbal remedies, or who simply questioned the world around them were declared heretics or witches. Even here in Coimbra—a town long revered as a place of learning—women had been put to the torch, often in great grisly pageants called Auto-da-Fé, or Acts of Faith, where scores of apostates and heretics were burned at the stake all at once.
Rather than shy away from such stigma, she and the others decided to lean in to it instead, defiantly naming their foundation Bruxas.
But the metaphor did not stop with the name.
Eliza Guerra had a computer station already booted up. The symbol for their organization glowed upon the screen, slowly spinning. It was a pentagram surrounded by a circle.
Designed by the author
The five points of the star represented the five women here, the original coven who had founded the organization at the University of Coimbra six years ago. They had no set leader. They voted on all matters equally.
Charlotte smiled past Eliza to the three others: Dr. Hannah Fest from the University of Cologne, Professor Ikumi Sato from the University of Tokyo, and Dr. Sophia Ruiz from the University of S?o Paulo. Though Charlotte had received her ambassadorship last year—not in small part due to her role in arranging this international organization based in Portugal—she had originally been a researcher like the others, teaching at Princeton and representing the United States.
Despite their differences, the five women—all in their fifties—had risen in their respective professions around the same time, enduring the same hardships because of their gender, experiencing the same discrimination and slights. Beyond their common interest in the sciences, they shared this bond. Their goal was to even the playing field, to encourage and help shepherd younger women into the sciences through scholarships, apprenticeships, and mentoring.
Their efforts had already produced great results around the world—especially here.
Hannah leaned toward a stick microphone resting beside the computer keyboard. “Mara, we’re all present.” She spoke in English with a thickly Teutonic accent. “You can start your demonstration when you’re ready.”
As Hannah stepped back, the screen split. The pentagram shrank to one side, revealing the young face of Mara Silviera. Though only twenty-one, she had already spent the past five years at Coimbra, earning a scholarship from Bruxas at the tender age of sixteen. Originally from a small village in the Galicia region of northern Spain, she had garnered the attention of a slew of tech companies after publishing a translation app that outshone anything currently on the market. She seemed to have an innate ability both with computers and with the fundamentals of language.
Even now, raw intelligence shone from her eyes. Or maybe just pride. Her dark mocha complexion coupled with her long, straight black hair suggested a mix of Moorish blood in her family’s past. She was presently across campus at the university’s Laboratory for Advanced Computing, which housed the Milipeia Cluster, one of the continent’s most powerful supercomputers.
Mara glanced slightly to the side. “I’ll start cycling Xénese up. We should be online in a minute.”
As the women gathered closer, Charlotte looked at her watch.
10:23 P.M.
Right on time.
She again pictured the sun perched above the Tropic of Capricorn, marking the culmination of the winter solstice, promising the end of darkness and the return of light.
Before that could happen, a loud iron clang made them all jump and turn.
A tight cluster of dark, hooded figures poured past the black gate and across the prison floor. In their hands, they bore large glossy pistols. The figures spread out, trapping the five women inside the computer vault.
There was no other exit from this room.
With her heart pounding in her throat, Charlotte backed up a step. She blocked the monitor with her body and reached blindly behind her. With a shift and click of the computer mouse, she collapsed the image of Mara Silviera, both to protect the young woman and to turn her into a silent witness. With the microphone and camera still broadcasting, Mara could see, hear, and even record what soon transpired.
As the figures closed in on the women, Charlotte willed Mara to call the police, though it was unlikely any rescue would arrive in time. She could not even be sure Mara was aware of the change in circumstance and was likely concentrating on her pending demonstration.
The eight assailants—all men—wore black robes with crimson silk sashes tied across their eyes like blindfolds. But from their manner and stealth, they plainly could see through the cloths.
Eliza Guerra stepped forward, ready to defend her library. “What is the meaning of this? What do you want?”
An unnerving silence answered her.
The assailants parted to reveal a ninth man, clearly the leader. Standing well over six feet, he wore a crimson robe with a black sash over his eyes, his garb a mirror image of the others. He carried no weapon, only a half-foot-thick tome. The worn leather binding was the same crimson as his robe. The gold gilt lettering on the cover was clearly visible: Malleus Maleficarum.
Charlotte shrank back, hope dying inside her. She had prayed this was merely a high-stakes heist. Many of the library’s volumes were priceless. But the book in the man’s hand threw her into despair. It appeared to be a first edition, one of only a few still in existence. One copy was preserved here at the Joanina Library. From the deep frown on Eliza’s face, maybe it was the very same edition, snatched from the stacks.
The book was written in the fifteenth century by a Catholic priest named Heinrich Kramer. The Latin name translated as The Hammer of Witches. Devised as a guide to identify, persecute, and torture witches, it was one of the most reviled and blood-soaked books in human history. Estimates put the number of victims attributed to this book at more than sixty thousand souls.