Freedom's Apprentic Page 17

  Zivar stood over me, the spell-chain draped over her hands. “There,” she said. “You were lucky. Now you’ve seen how it’s done.”

  “The woman of fire—”

  “Yes, she’s mine now. The aeriko.” Zivar dropped the spell-chain to the floor beside me. “I need to be sure the aeriko will obey orders from someone who isn’t me. Summon the spirit.”

  I picked up the spell-chain. The karenite bead was warm, from Zivar’s hand or the spirit’s presence I couldn’t say. “Show yourself,” I said, and there she was, a shimmer in the air, like a pale, miserable echo of the woman of fire I’d seen just moments earlier.

  “Tell her to do something.”

  What I wanted to do was to set her free. But I couldn’t do that, not with Zivar watching me. “Fetch me a feather from one of the birds that flies overhead,” I said.

  The djinn vanished; a moment later it was back, and a single white feather drifted slowly to the floor.

  “Good enough,” Zivar said, taking the spell-chain back from me. “Go to Penelopeia, to the home of Ligeia. It’s a brick house, painted with a huge green bird on the wall outside. Ligeia will be the pompous woman in a bright green robe, white haired, a sorceress with many spell-chains. Stay out of sight, but follow her quietly until she’s asleep, or better yet, having sex with her husband. Then disturb her loudly and tell her that you come from Zivar to tell her that the spell-chain is done. If she asks you what your instructions were, just tell her that you were told to find her. Then come back here.” Zivar looped the spell-chain around her wrist and tucked it inside her sleeve. “I need a drink,” she said. “Come on.” It took me a moment to realize that she was speaking to me now, and not the djinn.

  I followed her down to the kitchen, trailed by one sleepy servant who’d been left with a lamp to keep a watch for Zivar when she was done. The servant clearly understood the routine. We sat down at a table near the stove and the servant brought wine cups and a decanter. I could smell it even as she was pouring and realized that it was spirits of wine, not wine itself. This could make us very drunk very quickly.

  And that in fact seemed to be Zivar’s intention. She raised her cup in a brief salute, then drained it and poured herself a fresh cup, shooing away the servant with a flick of her wrist. I took a cautious sip. It burned my throat and tasted like I’d always imagined scorpion venom would taste, drunk straight. Zivar didn’t seem to mind it. The servant appeared again, this time setting out bread, already sliced, along with cheese and cold meat. I gratefully took some of the bread and cheese. Zivar ignored it.

  “I watched Mila for years before I first saw the borderland,” Zivar said. “You’re better than I was.”

  “Did she train you, or just let you watch her?”

  “I watched. She didn’t tell me much of anything, but that night I saw the borderland, I knew everything I needed to know. Good thing, too, as she died not long after that.” The servant had unobtrusively filled a plate for Zivar and slipped it in front of her; she took a piece of cheese, absentmindedly, nibbling off a corner before she put it down. “That’s what the weaving is all about. It’s supposed to make you open to going to the borderland. That’s how Penelope got there, so she thinks that’s how everyone’s supposed to go there. Never really did anything for me.”

  “Do you think I’ll be able to bind spirits now?”

  “Well, you’ve at least seen how it’s done. Whether you’ll be able to do it, who knows. Some can, some can’t. Some destroy themselves trying. Really, if I could send an aeriko back with a message to myself, ten years ago, I would tell her not to bother. It’s not worth it. What’s power, when you lose yourself?”

  “Have you lost yourself?”

  “I lose another piece every time I go to the borderland. And so will you. Sometimes it’s a big piece, sometimes it’s a small piece, but the aerika always claim their share.”

  “What about shamans? They go to the borderland. Do your slaves have a shaman?”

  “Shamans, ha. They’re a different breed. The aerika let them come and go more freely, because they don’t seek to bind, only to touch. Still, they get strange, too, after a while.” She poured herself more of the spirits of wine. “Mila, now. Once we had to wrap her in a sheet to keep her from harming herself, just as she was emerging from the dark days. Another time we had to wrap her in a sheet to keep her from killing someone else, when the cold fever was at its worst. This is why they say a sorceress needs a husband to look after her, because your slaves can’t be trusted, any more than your aeriko can.”

  “What about your apprentices?”

  That was very funny, for some reason. “Oh, yes. Thank Athena for apprentices. Will you bind me in a sheet if I want to throw myself off my tower, Xanthe? Will you? I think not. I think the task will fall to Nurzhan over there.” She indicated the servant standing in the shadows by the hearth.

  “How many spell-chains do you need, anyway?”

  “You’ll always need one more than you have,” Zivar said, dreamily caressing the new spell-chain with her fingers. “The new one I made, that aeriko spends almost all his time guarding the karenite I have hidden in the wall, in case one of the other sorceresses sends an aeriko to try to steal it. I used to worry night and day about someone stealing from me. Now I need a spell-chain so that I can send an aeriko out to look for someone I want to find. Aerika are terrible at finding people—at finding anything, really, because if someone sent you into my workroom to look for a particular bead, and you didn’t wish to be helpful, you could search for centuries and never find it. They will look, though, if you tell them, and sometimes they find the person you sent them to look for. Of course I could send one of the aerika I already have bound, but then I’d have to pull it away from its tasks. Do you see how it works? You never have enough.”

  Kyros made do with two, I thought. But if he’d had the ability to make more . . . No, he’d never have had enough.

  But I only need one.

  “Do you see the darkness coming?” Zivar asked me.

  “What?”

  “The darkness is coming, like a bird the size of a temple. I can hear its wings beating in the air above us; it’s settling in the courtyard, even now, folding its wings over the roof.” Her voice was still conversational and eerily calm.

  “Perhaps you hear Ligeia, returning?” I strained my own ears.

  “No.” She rose, unsteady from the drink; Nurzhan stepped swiftly to her side to catch her arm, supporting her. “Let the lights be put out, let the fires go cold,” she murmured. “Night is coming.”

  Nurzhan looked back at me. “Stay out of sight when Ligeia comes back,” she said. “I don’t think she’s supposed to know you’re here.”

  The kitchen was very quiet, with Nurzhan and Zivar gone. I took another sip of my spirits of wine, but it burned my throat again and I hated the taste. It was a shame to waste alcohol, but I had no doubt the servants would put it to good use. Leaving my cup on the table, I picked up the lamp and went to find the guest room, Tamar, and bed.

  In the morning, the whole house seemed weirdly quiet. Ligeia had apparently arrived, collected her spell-chain, and gone away again, leaving Zivar to her personal darkness. Zivar was still in bed. The servants seemed to think she would probably be there for days, or possibly weeks. “It’s the melancholia,” said the girl who brought up our breakfast, with a shrug. “She’s a sorceress. She’ll get over it in a few weeks.”

  “What’s the longest you’ve ever seen a melancholia last?”

  “For Zivar? Probably two months. Though my sister serves a sorceress who once spent an entire year dark.”

  Kyros’s wife still had regular melancholia, but hers seemed to be mostly just tired sadness, not bleak despair. When I tried to approach Zivar, I was gently but firmly turned away by the servant at her door. “It will only agitate her to see you. This morning she seemed to think that you were planning to sell her secrets to the Sisterhood. She’s dropped the idea of cutting you
r throat, but it’s best if you don’t remind her of your existence right now.”

  Cutting my throat. Well. “Thanks for not handing her a knife and showing her the way to where I was sleeping.”

  A shrug. “Don’t mention it.”

  Tamar was down in the kitchen, helping knead the bread. Apparently she’d been coming down daily for the last couple of days. I was surprised to see her so eager to help with a slave’s labor, but after pulling up a stool and sitting for a while I could understand why. It was warm in the kitchen, and the company was amiable. Everyone seemed to like Tamar a lot; I was accepted as her hanger-on, and I realized that the kindnesses the servants had shown to me—the extra trays of food, for instance—were because they liked Tamar.

  They had all heard that Zivar had wanted to cut my throat at some point during the night, and seemed to view it as very funny. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep her in her room until she’s her right self again,” one of the women said, patting me on the shoulder.

  “Remember the time she thought the squirrel outside her window was a spy sent by a Persian sorceress?” one of the other servants said. “Or the day that her fever told her that we all needed new clothes? She rounded up every servant, including the stable hands, and herded us all to a tailor’s shop on the other side of town. We came home dressed in velvet. Very impractical.”

  “Where does she get the money for that sort of thing?” Tamar asked.

  “She backs a merchant company; she gave them the spell-chains they need so that djinni can carry sky-boats loaded with fruit from Persia and bring it up to Daphnia. That sort of thing. She provided the djinni; they take care of operations and give her a cut of the money. That’s what keeps us in silks and velvets.” Everyone laughed again.

  It was snowing outside again; I went to visit the horses for a few hours, taking the time to groom Kara and Kesh and Krina. The stable hands were all girls—no smelly men about the place, as Zivar had put it. It should have been reminiscent of my days with the Alashi Sisterhood, but it wasn’t. Things were too strange, and Zivar was too crazy. I wondered if she would stay melancholic for the whole of the winter.

  The next day, again, she stayed shut up in her room—and the next, and the next. My days began to fall into a routine: morning with Tamar and the servants in the kitchen, afternoon in the stable with the horses. They desperately needed some exercise; perhaps when the snow stopped I’d take them out of the city, one by one, for a proper run. Tamar made it clear that she was glad to have my company again. As long as I was keeping her company, the household of a rogue sorceress was not such a bad place to spend the winter, after all.

  “Have you found anything out about Thais?” I asked Tamar one morning. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Oh.” She bit her lip and looked down. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about that.”

  “Tell me what?” I jumped immediately to the worst possibility I could think of. “Is she dead?”

  “No—well, not so far as I know.” Tamar sighed deeply and turned up her hands. “It turns out she was sold to a sorceress—to a household without a harem, in fact; you were right. She did menial labor for the sorceress, scrubbing the floors and walls to keep them clean. As you noted, though, she was quite beautiful, and she caught someone’s eye. He made the sorceress an excellent offer, and Thais was sold. The buyer wasn’t local, though, and no one knows where he was from. Once you described Thais, I was able to track her down remarkably fast, and I even talked to the other slaves owned by that sorceress! But they couldn’t tell me the buyer’s name. He was a Greek officer. That’s all they know.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. The trail was cold. But I was already thinking of ways to find her. There were a lot of Greek officers. But officers were easy for a djinn to find. If I had a spell-chain, I could find her. Without a spell-chain . . .

  I didn’t have wire, tools, or beads. But Zivar did. The servants probably wouldn’t stop me if I just went up to her workroom and started making a spell-chain. I’ve wasted enough time. I’ve made enough excuses. Tamar didn’t want me making a spell-chain, but she’d do what she could to protect me—she’d have the servants warn me if Zivar suddenly left her bed. And as long as I was out of the workroom by the time she arrived—I’d seen how she worked. She’d never notice a little wire missing, a few beads.

  That afternoon, I headed for the staircase to Zivar’s workroom instead of the stable. I was still afraid, but I had to admit that I was afraid that I would succeed and become a sorceress, with all that meant. And that, I knew I was right to fear. But it’s why I came here. It’s what I’m here for. No more excuses.

  The servants had cleaned. Once again, every bead had been picked up and put away; the old rugs had been beaten clean and rolled back out on the floor. Looking around, I thought I saw the shimmer of the djinn that Zivar had set to guard her karenite, but when I turned for a closer look I realized it was just the winter sunshine filtering through the glass window and reflecting off a row of glittering beads, laid out on her shelf.

  My hand stole to the pouch I carried under my clothes. She had set one djinn to guard her other pieces of karenite. The purpose of the pouch around her neck suddenly dawned on me: it was to make it too dangerous to have someone else’s djinn steal it. I opened a drawer and borrowed a pouch. Then I pulled out Zivar’s chair and sat down. Her tools lay beside my right hand, a long thread of silver wire lay to my left. Well, then.

  The first step was to make a bead. I took out Zivar’s files to smooth down the rough edges of the stone. I had not used a file much in the past, but at least this was fairly straightforward—monotonous, but not something that required exceptional skill. I wondered if I could leave the karenite rough—did it have to be filed down and polished? Zivar’s was much rougher than the karenite bead she’d gotten from Ligeia, I was certain of that. Best to just copy what Zivar did. I worked for hours, until I was satisfied that it was as smooth as Zivar’s had been.

  Now it was time to drill. I tightened her vise around the stone, realizing that I didn’t know how much pressure would make it crack. The drill was easy to find, but not easy to use. It kept slipping to the side, scratching the stone without actually making a hole in it. Finally I got enough of a hole started to provide a little groove for the drill itself, and once that held the drill in place, things went fairly quickly.

  There. I had a bead. I held it in the palm of my hand and blew gently to chase away the dust, wondering if there was any magic in those tiny scattered bits.

  A sound from the doorway startled me; I jumped off the stool like I was going to pretend I’d been polishing Zivar’s worktable. Nurzhan regarded me, a little amused, a lamp in her hand.

  “How is Zivar?” I asked, trying to pretend that I hadn’t been startled.

  “The fever has ebbed,” Nurzhan said. “The dangerous part is past, we think. We will keep watch to make sure the darkness doesn’t drive her to harming herself, but she’s no longer likely to harm others.” She placed the lamp in its holder. “Should I send up a tray of food for you?”

  “Will Zivar be angry, when she comes back to herself, and finds that I was up here, and that you were helping me?”

  Nurzhan shrugged. “She won’t be angry at us. If she’s angry at you . . .” She shrugged. It wasn’t her problem.

  “I’ve heard that sorceresses are either the best masters, or the worst,” I said. “Were you frightened when you were sold to her?”

  Nurzhan leaned back against the wall and gave me a long, meditative look, sizing me up. I had asked a rather personal question, I realized, and a strange one, inquiring about a slave’s personal life. Perhaps they expected that of Tamar; it was probably obvious to the slaves that Tamar had once been a slave. But this was a strange question, and one Nurzhan clearly wanted to consider for a moment before answering.

  “Do you know Zivar’s secret?” she asked, after a long silence.

  I stared at her; this was not the answer
I had expected.

  “This is why we are servants, not slaves,” Nurzhan said. “We hold her secrets. All slaves know secrets their owners wish they didn’t, but Zivar’s secret is far more dangerous than most. Perhaps living here, you should know it as well. You and your companion.” From the look she gave me, I thought she was probably more concerned about protecting Tamar than protecting me. I still didn’t know what she was talking about though, and she said impatiently, “She did tell you, I believe, in almost so many words, that night before the darkness took her. When you drank together, and spoke of who would bind the mistress when she was in a frenzy.”

  “She said you would do it.” Nurzhan continued to stare at me like I was a very stupid child, and I suddenly remembered the other thing she had said: Mila, now. Once we had to wrap her in a sheet to keep her from harming herself . . . This is why they say a sorceress needs a husband to look after her, because your slaves can’t be trusted.

  “Yes,” Nurzhan said. “Now you see. Mila was not a teacher, but a master. We’ve pried the full story out of her, in bits and pieces over time. Zivar was a slave down in Persia, owned by one of the lesser Weavers, Mila. She spied on Mila and learned her craft. When Mila died, she had learned enough that she was able to go to Ligeia and claim that she’d been Mila’s apprentice, and persuaded Ligeia to finish teaching her. And so the mouse became the mistress.”

  “What would the Sisterhood do, if they knew?”

  “We don’t know. But they could kill her easily enough; they hold several of her spell-chains.”

  “Would you ever tell?”

  “And risk being sold to a sorceress I had no hold over? Unlikely.”