Freedom's Apprentic Page 16

  “I don’t think that would work very well,” I said, knowing that my own voice was faint and a little shaky.

  Zivar put her tools down and looked up to fix me with her green eyes. “Look, Xanthe or whatever your name is. One mouse is not going to give another mouse to the owls. Do you understand me?”

  I wasn’t sure whether I did or not. I licked my dry lips and said, “You may have a statue of a mouse at your doorstep, but I think I see an owl in front of me.”

  Zivar sighed and went back to her work. “Fine. But remember, I have information you want.”

  “You already told me you’re just going to give me vague promises and empty platitudes.”

  “So I did. That’s all we bargained for, after all.” She looked into her cup full of links and then shook them out onto her worktable. “Patience, young weaver,” she intoned. “To truly understand the arts of Athena, one must pursue her wisdom as well as her power.” And she closed her mouth and said nothing more for several hours.

  All the beads were on links; now she began to connect the links together. That went faster than I expected; it wasn’t a great deal longer before she had a long line of links, almost as tall as she was. Finally, she took the karenite out of the pouch, threaded it onto the wire, and fastened it to one end of the chain. A single loop of wire could turn it into something that looked exactly like a spell-chain. She placed it on her worktable, held it in her hands, and closed her eyes.

  Nothing happened for a very long time.

  Then she opened her eyes, and I saw a faint strange glint in them, like a djinn looking out from the eyes of a shaman. But she was the one who possessed the djinn, I knew; not the other way around. A quick twist, and the chain was closed in a circle.

  “It’s done,” she said. I’d guessed as much. “I’m going to go take a bath.”

  So she just closed her eyes, and it was done?”

  “She meditated, I think. Like Zhanna, but without a drum, or dancing, or anything.”

  I was slumped against one of the pillows, a cup of tea in my hands; Tamar sat beside me, staring into the fire. “So do you have any idea how she did what she did?”

  “No.”

  “Have you learned anything in the last week?”

  “Yeah. I know how a sorceress makes the necklace now. I just don’t know how she imprisons a djinn in it.”

  “That seems kind of important.”

  “Yeah, I think so, too.”

  “Could you maybe get her to talk about it?”

  “Maybe.” I thought about our conversation about the Alashi. “Zivar asked yesterday why the Alashi cast us out. She was convinced that we’d been with the Alashi, and that was how we got our horses.”

  “Oh, great.” Tamar sat bolt upright. “Do you think she’s going to turn us in?”

  “No. She said that a mouse wouldn’t feed a fellow mouse to the owls.”

  “So what’s that supposed to mean? She’s a sorceress, isn’t she?”

  “That’s what I said to her. And then she quit talking. If I tell her more about the Alashi, maybe she’ll tell me more about sorcery.”

  “Be careful, Lauria. You’re a really trusting person. Don’t tell Zivar anything you wouldn’t want Kyros, or someone just like him, to know.”

  I woke up in the morning to the sound of unaccustomed activity; the servants were rushing around in a panic. Curious, I went downstairs to see what was going on, only to find myself shoved into a closet by one of the servants. “You mustn’t be seen,” she hissed. “Stay here! I’ll see to Tamar.”

  The closet shared a wall with the receiving room. I pressed my ear against the wall and listened quietly.

  Footsteps. Then Zivar’s voice, low and respectful. “Ligeia. You honor my house.”

  “Zivar, child.” An older woman’s voice. I heard a sisterly kiss. Another sorceress, no doubt.

  “Let me just send for tea.” Zivar stepped out of the room, and I heard her hiss to a servant in the hall, “Keep them out of sight. Oh, and bring us tea and something to eat, whatever the kitchen can find to send up.”

  I had no desire to make trouble for Zivar with the Sisterhood; that definitely would not be to my advantage. Listening, on the other hand . . . I settled in with my ear against the wall.

  “How is your health?” Ligeia asked as Zivar stepped back in.

  “I can’t complain,” Zivar said.

  “Still no husband?”

  “I don’t want a smelly man about the place.”

  “Hmph. It’s not good for a Weaver to be alone.”

  “My servants take good care of me.”

  “They’ll bleed you dry in your dark weeks, if they think they can get away with it. A Weaver needs family.”

  “It really touches me to know you care, Ligeia. You’re like a mother to me.”

  Ugh. At least my mother’s nagging is out of love. I kept my ear against the wall.

  “Will you be staying long?” Zivar asked. “I can have the servants ready the bedroom . . .” A rustle, as if she were edging toward the door.

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t think of putting you to the trouble. No, I’m really here on business, though of course I’d like to catch up with you, first. I won’t be staying long. Tell me, how goes your weaving?”

  Zivar said nothing. Ligeia sighed heavily. “You are a stubborn one. Well, it makes you a better sorceress, I suppose. Here.”

  A pause, then, “What do you want?”

  “A spell-chain, of course. Or rather, the Sisterhood wants a spell-chain. The spirit must be bound tightly enough for the chain to be given outside the Sisterhood.”

  “You’ve only brought one piece.”

  “That’s right. You’re only making one chain.”

  “Shouldn’t you have brought a piece for me, as well?”

  “Not this time.” Ligeia’s voice was crisp, but with an edge of defensiveness. “Perhaps next time.” A creak as she moved toward the door. “We need it soon. You’ll need to start work today, and we need it as soon as you can get it done.” I heard Ligeia’s footsteps retreating, back out to the courtyard, where presumably her palanquin waited. Zivar stood frozen in the hallway. When I was certain that Ligeia was gone, I eased the door open a crack and looked out to see her staring at a piece of karenite in her hand.

  She looked up and saw me; she looked tired and sad. “Back to the workroom,” she said, and headed upstairs.

  Though it had only been a day since she’d finished the spell-chain I’d watched her make, the servants had been busy. The workroom had been swept, every bead picked up from the floor and from the heap of discarded beads, and sorted into a bowl or vase or box. They had swept the corners and polished the worktable; they even appeared to have taken the rugs out and beaten the dust out of them before spreading them back out onto the floor. A fire waited for us. They do take good care of you, I thought. I hope you don’t ever do like that sorceress Tamar talked about; they deserve better than that.

  Zivar took down a metal chalice of polished silver and dropped the karenite inside. This piece had already been cut into a bead, drilled, and polished. She set the chalice back up on her shelf—apparently karenite from the Sisterhood didn’t need to be locked away. She saw me watching and said, “If anyone steals this one from me, I’ll complain to the Sisterhood and they’ll have the thief make the spell-chain instead. It’s not as if I’ll get to keep it.”

  She took down a bowl made from a dried shell of a gourd, cut in half. The beads inside were mixed glass beads of different colors; she raked her fingers through them. “You want to be a sorceress. Have you ever seen one die?”

  “No.”

  “I have.” She plucked out a bead, blood red, and set it on the table in front of her. “You probably know that you shouldn’t tell a bound aeriko to kill someone. It breaks the spell that holds them here, and back they go to the shadow world. If someone else held the chain and gave the order, sometimes they’re killed; the sorceress who made the chain is always
killed. When I saw it happen, it was because—” she took out another bead, also red “—some pompous inflated fool of a military officer, some dim-witted, self-important little cockroach, had been given one of her chains to hold, and in a moment of panic, gave the order to kill. The aeriko didn’t kill him, though of course the Sisterhood did, later. For Mila, there was no warning; it was like an arrow out of nowhere. She was at dinner, and for a moment I thought she was choking. But then she began to scream. I don’t think it took all that long, but the screaming seemed to last for hours. There was a rug on the floor, and grabbing it in her agony, she wrenched a hole in it. We watched her die, helpless.” Out came another bead; this one was broken, and had a ragged edge. It had cut the edge of her thumb. “I hated Mila. I’ve never once missed her company. But even in my darkest dreams I never would have wished that sort of death on her.”

  My mouth was dry. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

  “For some reason it’s seldom hard for a sorceress to remember not to tell her aerika to kill someone. Even when we haven’t seen a sorceress die that way, it’s just not something that we tend to forget. I think the certainty of painful death tends to focus the attention. But when the chain leaves our hands . . .” She threw her own hands out, empty. “I wish I at least knew who this chain was going to.”

  I wondered if it was going to Kyros, of the two misplaced aerika.

  “Ligeia doesn’t much like me. That means that if they have to give a spell-chain to someone unpredictable, someone they don’t entirely trust, I’m one of the ones they’ll have make it.”

  “Can you just refuse?”

  “Of course not.” Out came more glass beads: blue, yellow, black. “I could run away, I suppose. I could take my own spell-chains and palanquin and have my aerika take me to the ends of the earth, far outside the Empire, but then what? The Sisterhood owns the soul-stone—most of it, at least. What’s galling is that they expect me to work for free. To bind for them, and they didn’t give me a piece of the soul-stone to use for myself. I’ve heard rumors that they’re running out. I don’t believe it, though. I think they’re just realizing that the less they give away, the more power they can control themselves. I think they started a rumor that they were running short of soul-stone so that we wouldn’t assume they were being stingy just to control things.” She dropped a handful of beads on her worktable, sorted through them quickly, and brushed all but two into her new discard pile in the corner. “It’s not a good idea, though. Now people are buying their soul-stone from traders, secretly, and the Sisterhood has even less power. In some ways.”

  “But they can still tell you to make a spell-chain, and you’ll do it.”

  “It’s not worth the trouble of running away.” She took down a pottery jar with a swirling red glaze and began to line up glazed clay beads on her table, like a giant multicolored centipede.

  “You talk about the ‘Sisterhood’ like you’re not in it,” I said. “Aren’t you a member of the Sisterhood of Weavers?”

  “Well, of course.” She put the last bead in place and began to stroke the beads gently with one finger, pulling out a half-dozen as she went down the line and sweeping the rest into the corner. “But I’m not part of the inner circle, the ones who run things. I’m a novice, a youngster. Someday I suppose the inner circle will be made up of women who are novices now, but I won’t be one of them. I’ll be an old, bitter, crazy outsider.”

  “You seem quite sure of that.”

  “Well, Mila died. If you’re going to find yourself in power in Penelopeia, you need to apprentice yourself to someone who will open the door for you.”

  “You weren’t apprenticed to Ligeia?”

  “After Mila died, I went to Ligeia and asked her to finish my training, and she did. So she acts like I was her apprentice, but I wasn’t, really, and she doesn’t treat me as one of her own unless it’s to her advantage.” From one of her shelves she pulled down a new bowl. “Do you know what this is?” she asked, and handed it to me, a faint smile on her face.

  I held it up and looked at it. It was one of the strangest bowls I’d ever seen. It was heavy, like clay; the inside was smooth, a pearly pink color. The outside was rough and ridged, with horned bits that jutted out. They felt a little like rock, or like bone, but I’d never seen a bone that looked like this before. “Carved stone?” I guessed.

  “It’s a seashell. Penelopeia is near the sea, too, but this is from the great southern ocean, beyond Persia. These wash up on the shore, sometimes. There are creatures who live inside the shells, but the creature from this one died a long time ago. I use it for beads.” She put the handful of beads she’d chosen inside, and set it on her table, balancing it on three of the spines. “Have you ever seen the ocean?”

  “No.” I wanted to touch the shell again; I wanted to run my fingers over the smooth inside. “Have you?”

  “Yes, long ago. But I didn’t find the shell, I bought it from a trader.”

  Zivar pulled out a teacup full of star-shaped metal beads and began to sort through them. “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “I’m listening for the ones making the right noise,” she said. “The soul-stone makes a noise—” she hummed, a single high note. “I need beads that sing that note. When I’m making spell-chains for myself, I like to choose beads that sound nice together even if they aren’t all singing the same note. When I’m working for the Sisterhood, I just want beads that sing the same note. Why try for beauty?”

  She has to be making this up, I thought, but her eyes were on her work, her face serious. She wasn’t watching for my reaction, just describing what she was doing. Beads that sing? Great, I’m going to fail at this, too. Though as I watched, I remembered the dream I’d had with the burning sky full of colors that tasted of apples and mint leaves. I’d never experienced anything like that awake, though.

  Zivar sped up as she worked; imperceptibly, at first, but as the day wore on I realized that beads were being scattered across the floor like thrown sand, and when she spoke out loud—sometimes to me, sometimes to herself—I could barely understand her. When our food came, she didn’t touch it.

  Night fell and I expected her to put her work down; instead, she shouted down the stairs for her servants, who brought up a dozen lamps to provide light. The servants returned each hour to replenish the oil, as Zivar sleeplessly hunted through her beads. I was tired, but propped my chin on my fists and kept watching. She was in a more talkative mood than she’d been before, and I was reluctant to leave when she might tell me something useful, like how to “hear” the beads or—for that matter—how to actually bind the aerika.

  “None of these,” she muttered as she hunted through one cup. “None of these. Oh, these are terrible, terrible.” Her hand shook and they scattered over her rug. “Oh, no!” she shrieked. “No, I don’t like their song, and now they’re everywhere.”

  The waiting servant hurried in. “Clean them up,” Zivar said, pointing at the rug, her hand shaking. “No, no, that’s not going to be fast enough,” she said as the woman started to pick up tiny beads one by one. “Just roll up the rugs and take them out, all of them! Out!”

  The servant rolled up the rugs without question and took them downstairs. A few minutes later another servant brought up new rugs and rolled them out, silently, on the floor.

  “Ligeia,” Zivar murmured under her breath, and then began to sing the name. “Ligeia, Ligeia, Ligeia. Mila Mila Mila Mila Mila. Ligeia Mila Ligeia Mila.”

  Her bowl of beads was full around dawn. Now she got her tools back out, and her wire. “I’m going to need more wire,” she murmured, and shouted down instructions to her servants again. She sat down and began to make links, as she had before: thread on a bead, loop, snip, loop. The cold fever—for that was certainly what I was seeing—didn’t interfere with her efficiency. She worked with a ferocious concentration, occasionally launching into a strange monologue that I might have been able to understand if she’d been
speaking either Danibeki or Greek.

  When the last of her links was done, she put down her tools and briefly stretched her cramped hands. “It’s not fair,” she said, quite distinctly. “Every binding makes us a little bit worse. The cold fever becomes colder, the dark days become darker. To sacrifice that for the Sisterhood . . .”

  “But running away is too much trouble?”

  “It’s not just the trouble. There’s also the danger that I’d be caught. Soul-stone is always the property of Athena, you know.” She took up her tools again. “Maybe next time they demand a binding from me, if they don’t bring a piece of soul-stone for me, too.” She bent her head over her work; it was time to start linking the pieces together.

  I’d lost track of time. The servants were lighting lamps again. I was so tired that my vision blurred and I saw two Zivars instead of one. I need to just rest my eyes, I thought as I lay down on the rug near her feet. Just for a few minutes, so that I can keep watching.

  I could hear the click-click-click of the beads, and then something else—a low hum, like a hundred voices singing the same note. Oh, now I hear them, I thought, and dropped into sleep.

  The night I’d tried to find Zhanna, to speak with her, I’d found myself under a sky of burning clouds. Tonight, I realized, I was surrounded by a circle of dancing flames, but it wasn’t clouds, it was a net. I could still hear the hum I’d heard as I was falling asleep, only now I thought I heard words, or the edges of them—voices singing something that I could almost understand, but not quite.

  It’s the spell-chain.

  Where was Zivar? She was here, I knew, but I couldn’t see her.

  Suddenly, the colors around me flared up bright and new. There was an aeriko here, trapped within the circle of flame. Looking at it here, I saw not the indistinct shimmer, but the figure of a woman made of fire. “Run,” she whispered to me, and her despair hit me like freezing water, icing around me even as the noose of colors tightened close around both of us. I couldn’t run, or even move, and for a moment I thought that I would be trapped in the spell-chain, too, forced to obey Zivar’s orders. The dark sky, the open emptiness, those were gone. I could see nothing but the brightness, hear nothing but the hum, and then at the last moment I felt something push me, and I lay on the floor, awake.