Freedom's Gate Read online

  I clenched my teeth and forced myself to smile. “Of course, Kyros. Thank you.”

  I glanced at the sorceress one more time before I left. Her eyes were still fixed on me; this time, I was reminded of a cat, patiently stalking its prey. I bowed to her slightly—Ligeia, I thought, that must be her name—and left.

  I caught a glimpse of Kyros’s wife in the inner courtyard as I passed. She seldom went out beyond its walls, and almost never left Kyros’s compound. She had never liked me, and I generally tried to avoid her. She looked up as I passed, and quickly turned away. As usual, my very presence seemed to irritate her, and I quickly headed for my room.

  I had a comfortable room in one of the towers in Kyros’s compound, with two windows, a soft chair, a softer bed, and a writing desk. I fetched down my journal—a leather-bound book of expensive blank paper—and my pen and ink. I jotted down the day’s events quickly, noting that Myron had come along, but that I’d found Alibek by myself. Then I started to write about my next assignment and paused, realizing that I wouldn’t be able to take my journal with me. Normally I carried it along on trips. I spent little enough time in this room; as Kyros’s assistant, or his “spy,” I spent most of my time visiting garrisons. The usual justification was that I was carrying a message too sensitive to be trusted to an aeriko. An aeriko couldn’t give you its opinion of a garrison’s morale, the commander’s relationship with his officers, and so on. An aeriko also couldn’t audit the books, privately question the second-in-command, smell the commander’s breath for alcohol, or peek into the shrine to Athena to make sure it hadn’t become a shrine to Arachne (as had happened in one particularly bizarre instance at one very isolated garrison).

  That had been a strange trip, and a good example of the limits of aerika as messengers. Kyros sent me to check in on the garrison because the commander had stopped sending messages, though he had a spell-chain for precisely that purpose. The first strange thing I noticed was that the commander wasn’t wearing his spell-chain around his neck or wrist. I also noticed that he found an excuse to get a look at my wrists shortly after I arrived, and that he became slightly less guarded once he confirmed that I wasn’t carrying a spell-chain, either. He took me to his office, offered me wine, and gave me a fairly leisurely update on their last few months.

  But he left something out: he was not in fact the garrison commander. He was the second-in-command. The commander himself was in bed and under guard. Contact with aerika had made him mercurial—exceptionally so. It wasn’t clear to me whether he had simply dropped the burden of command like a bag that had become too heavy, or whether his subordinates had wrested it from his grasp because his behavior had become so unpredictable. The second-in-command had taken over and then, like a superstitious child, had locked the spell-chain inside a strongbox and locked the strongbox in a closet, which he placed under guard.

  I wouldn’t normally have even entered the shrine to Athena and Alexander while visiting a garrison, but it was also under guard, and that was what made me curious. After shedding my own escort I managed a peek inside, and saw the vast web of spiders, with Prometheus’s fire burning where Alexander’s helmet should have been. I thought that no one had seen me, but later that night I found a deadly spider in my own room. And while it might have simply wandered in of its own accord, I decided that the situation was quickly getting out of control.

  Kyros sent his aeriko to speak with me that evening, and I instructed it to simply remove me, and the rightful commander, and carry us back to Kyros. It had been a stomach-turning and terrifying trip, but the aeriko had set us down gently on our feet just within Kyros’s walls. Kyros had dealt with the garrison. I had worried that something bad would happen to Zhade; in particular, I’d feared that they’d use her as a sacrifice to Prometheus and Arachne. But when Kyros’s soldiers rode into the garrison a day later, they found her safe in the stable. The renegade soldiers were gone. Off into the desert to become their own group of bandit deserters, apparently. Despite their fear of it, they took the spell-chain with them.

  The aeriko Kyros had sent had interpreted its orders to speak to the commander of the garrison to mean that it should speak to the person it found in command, rather than the real commander, under guard. And it neglected to mention this change of command, along with the other changes of note. Aerika would obey your commands but not your intent anytime they could; Kyros’s aeriko must have been delighted with all the information it could fail to pass along.

  With a sigh, I dragged my thoughts back to the matter at hand, and tried to order them enough to set it all down on paper. Kyros is sending me first to the home of a man called Sophos. Will escape from there, using Sophos as a cover story. I sat back, stroking my lips with the edge of the quill. Dislike the idea of posing as a slave. Also, uncertain of what kind of slave I could credibly pose as. I had the horse skills to work in a stable; I supposed I could work in Sophos’s stables for a few weeks. I had a bad feeling that there would be some chore I couldn’t do right—something that any slave would have done a hundred times. And that would be just as true in any other part of Sophos’s household. The Alashi pose their own dangers. I just warned Alibek about their practice of human sacrifice; I have no desire to be tossed onto the flames myself. I paused and read that over, then added, The Alashi also poison their arrows when raiding Greek garrisons. What if I have to go on a raid, to maintain my disguise?

  At least the stories about the Alashi couldn’t all be true. In addition to the stories about people being burned alive, I’d heard that the Alashi sacrificed captives with the bite of a poisonous spider. I’d also heard that runaways who asked to join the Alashi were subjected to the bite of a poisonous spider to prove their worthiness, if they survived. That seemed a little more likely, as young, strong people often survived spider bites; it wouldn’t be a terribly reliable form of human sacrifice.

  They were also said to eat horses and the flesh of scavenger birds. I was fairly certain that the stories claiming they ate human flesh were poetic exaggeration. I think I could eat horse meat, if necessary, I wrote in my journal. Using poison against Greeks like Nikon—I suppose I could always shoot over their heads.

  I stood up to look out my window. It was midafternoon, and quite hot; slow-moving servants passed below me outside. I disliked time off from work; I hated visiting my mother. I stared for a while at a loose goat, wandering at large through the compound, then sighed and pushed back my chair. It crossed my mind, as I walked down to the gate, to visit Alibek in the harem, but I pushed the thought firmly away.

  I didn’t like to think about this fact, but my mother had herself once been a harem slave, like Alibek. Set free by her generous master, she was now the mistress of one of the Greek officers from the garrison. I did not actually know who, as I’d never met him. When I was a young child, my mother would send me away well in advance of his arrival; as I grew older, I deliberately avoided crossing his path. There are things no one really wants to know about her mother.

  She lived above a gem-cutter’s shop in a neighborhood of Elpisia inhabited mostly by free Danibeki and foreigners; there were also some Greek tradespeople here, like the gem cutter, who’d come out to the edges of the Empire for one reason or another. I’d grown up in this neighborhood, playing games with the other children in the narrow streets. My mother had no trade for me to learn, and sent me away whenever her officer was coming to visit. I grew up an outcast; until I started working for Kyros I had never quite fit in anywhere. Not with the Danibeki, and certainly not with the Greeks.

  There was a flower vendor in the street, selling flowers from one of the tended gardens within the city walls. I stopped to buy some flowers for my mother—white roses, I decided, after looking over the options. An offering of sorts. I tucked the roses under one arm, wished that I’d combed my hair a bit more carefully, then went up the steps to her apartment.

  Even when I was a child, I had compared my mother to the Greek women in Elpisia—the merchants and
wives of Greek officers. In particular, there was a lady who lived across the street from the gem-cutter’s shop who I would watch out the window, the wife of a Greek goldsmith. When I was very young, she seemed to me to be Athena personified, and even when I was older, she seemed to be everything my mother was not: crisp and immaculate, as calm as a still pool. When it was time for her children to come home at night she had a bell she would ring; she didn’t stand in the doorway and bellow their names at the top of her lungs, like my mother and the other free Danibeki. My mother might be able to present the impression of being a still pool, for a few moments, until you got close enough to see the whirl of sand and fish, broken branches and wave-pounded rocks. She was a still pool like the Arys River at the height of the spring rains.

  When she was expecting me, or anyone else, she wore a white Greek-style gown of pressed linen. She was expecting no visitors today, however, and when she answered the door she was wearing a loose robe of faded red silk, a long-ago gift from her officer. Her face went from sleepy to animated in a moment: “Lauria! Oh, it’s delightful to see you, my darling. Come upstairs and sit down.” I proffered the roses in silence as we reached her sitting room. “Are those for me? Oh, you shouldn’t have. Let me find some water for them . . .” I could hear her humming as she dipped some water out of a bucket into a vase, and set the flowers in the window. “Come, darling, let me look at you.”

  I gave my mother a hug and a kiss on the cheek; she pulled me down beside her to stroke my hair. “Tsk,” she murmured. “When are you going to grow out your hair, little one? You have such beautiful hair when it’s long.”

  “It’s not that short.” I pulled a black curl loose and held it out. “It’s down to my shoulders.”

  “When you were little it went all the way down to your waist . . .”

  “And tangled horribly.”

  “You have beautiful hair.” She stroked it again. “But it is tangled. Go get my brush, darling.”

  I fetched the brush with a sigh and sat at her feet. She unbound my hair, which I kept braided so that it didn’t fall into my eyes, and began to brush it slowly.

  “So what have you been up to since I saw you last?”

  I’d visited last a month ago—no, two months ago. “I went down to Daphnia,” I said. “Kyros had me carry a message to lady there in the Sisterhood of Weavers.”

  My mother stood up abruptly and strode over to look out her window. “I don’t understand why Kyros can’t send an aeriko with messages,” she said.

  “All you can trust an aeriko to do is carry words back and forth,” I said. “I could tell Kyros that the sorceress was pregnant, that she seemed pleased by his message, that her husband was there as well. I can tell him what I see. What I hear, smell, taste. If something makes me suspicious I can even take more of a look around, not that I really wanted to piss off a sorceress.”

  My mother’s mouth was tight and unhappy. “I wish you stayed closer to home.”

  “What would I do here?”

  “Constanta’s daughter has been married for a year and a half now. When are you going to get married?”

  I snorted in disgust, louder than I’d meant to. “I don’t know. Sometime.”

  Her pale hand was clenched in a fist. “Daphnia. My daughter goes to Daphnia. I’ve never been there.”

  Maybe you should look for a job other than “mistress” if you want to travel. I didn’t say that out loud, of course, but my mother glared at me so fiercely for a moment I thought she’d heard my thoughts. There are Danibeki slaves who believe that some people can read the thoughts of their blood kin, if they try. Or even control their thoughts, up to a point—but if my mother could do that, she’d have the daughter she wanted instead of being stuck with me. “You’re a beautiful girl, Lauria,” she said after a moment. “You’re as beautiful as I was at your age, or you would be if you took better care of your hair and your hands. If I was beautiful enough to win my own freedom, you’re certainly beautiful enough to have a husband by now.” She paused, then said, “Cybela has a son, Brasidas . . .”

  “No! Thank you, Mother, but no.”

  “You haven’t even met the boy. How do you know—”

  “I happen to like working for Kyros. Brasidas is the son of a carpet weaver. I’m sure a carpet weaver would not be happy to have a wife who goes off for months at a time carrying messages . . .”

  “He’s Greek—”

  “He is three years younger than I am. He used to pick his nose and try to wipe his hands off on the other kids.”

  “That was years ago! He’s grown up into a perfectly nice young man—”

  “Mother—”

  “—and you had some nasty enough habits as a child!”

  “I’m leaving in four days,” I said.

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. A long time.”

  Something in my tone of voice made her sink back down in her chair. “Where is Kyros sending you now?” Her voice was shaking.

  I sat down quietly beside her. “I’m going to infiltrate the bandits,” I said. “Kyros is going to have me pose as a slave of one of his friends and pretend to escape.”

  “But—you’re half Greek!”

  “So are a good quarter of the slaves in the cities. Apparently the Alashi don’t care.”

  “Lauria, this sounds dangerous!”

  “My job is always dangerous,” I said, exasperated.

  “This was all Kyros’s idea?”

  “No,” I said. “I think the idea might have been suggested by a sorceress.” At my mother’s look of alarm, I hastily added, “Kyros wouldn’t send me off to certain doom! The Alashi are going to have no idea that I’m anything but an escaped slave.”

  “But to pose as a slave . . .” My mother looked oddly distant for a moment, then examined me with a critical eye. “You carry yourself as a free woman, not someone who fears being beaten. You don’t have the reserve, the shyness, the slyness. Anyone looking at you would know you weren’t a slave.”

  I laughed. “Mother, the guards at the Elpisia gate stop me every time I leave the city! Clearly not everyone knows I’m a free woman. They look at me and see my Danibeki mother, not my Greek father.”

  “The Greeks see that. A slave would know. Any slave would know.”

  “It’s not really Sophos’s slaves I have to fool, is it? It’s the Alashi. Staying with Sophos is just to give me a cover story, somewhere to escape from.”

  My mother shook her head, still horrified. “You’re really set on doing this?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I’m really ‘set’ on doing this.”

  “Well, a slave wouldn’t stand like you’re standing.”

  “How am I standing?”

  My mother stood up, then sighed as she looked me over. “Imagine a point at the center of your body, and try to disappear into it.” She nudged my back, my shoulders, my hips. Then she demonstrated: “Like this.” Her arms were pressed to her sides, her head slightly bent. “You don’t want to be noticed. Being noticed means that you’ll probably just get into trouble.”

  “Did getting noticed get you in trouble? I thought you were freed because your master’s wife ‘noticed’ you.”

  My mother’s eyes narrowed. “Fine,” she said. “If you don’t want my advice, you don’t have to listen to it.” She sat back down and picked up some mending from a basket by her chair.

  I bit my lip, wishing I’d just kept my mouth shut. My mother’s advice would almost certainly be useful, but I hated to ask her for it. Finally I bit down on my pride and asked, “Is this better?”

  My mother looked up from her mending. “Oh perfect,” she said. “I’m sure whatever you do is just right. Why don’t you ask Kyros anyway? He’s the one who thought this would be a good idea.”

  I clenched my teeth, trying not to spit out any of the dozen bitter rejoinders that had occurred to me. My mother bit off the thread and tucked her needle into a leather case. “Would you lik
e a cup of tea, darling?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Oh well. I’ll have one myself, I think.” She had a little brazier in the corner of her room, and poked at it to perk the fire up a bit, setting on her kettle. “So. Other than rides to Daphnia and impersonating a slave, what have you been up to?”

  “Not much,” I muttered.

  “Kyros keeps you so busy? You never have time to have fun?”

  “I ride Zhade.”

  “Ah.” My mother poked at the fire again. “Now, Cybela’s daughter Daphnis, she’s taken up the three-stringed lute. Cybela has invited me over to hear her play sometimes.”

  “How lovely.” I had meant to sound sincere, but I knew as soon as the words were out that I sounded anything but.

  “Well.” She slammed the poker down. “Maybe spending some time pretending to be a slave will teach you some manners. Will your ‘master’ beat you if he thinks you’re being insolent?”

  “He’d better not.”

  “And that is precisely the attitude that will tell the slaves that you are not really one of them.”

  I had a bad feeling that she was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. “I’d better go.”

  “So soon?” In an instant, my mother had gone from cold outrage to placating clinginess. “But you aren’t leaving for four days!”

  “I have preparations to make.” I stooped to kiss her cheek.

  My mother returned my kiss and then grabbed the collar of my shirt, holding me close to her for a moment. “Come back tomorrow. I’ll show you how to move and speak like a slave. This is not the sort of thing that you can learn from Kyros. And I—” Her voice faltered. “I am afraid of the consequences if you fail.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, and she released me. “Good-bye.”

  I first met Kyros when I was eleven. I had gone out furious after a fight with my mother; as I grew into a woman, her frantic desire to shape me into the beautiful, graceful daughter she wanted had become an ongoing feud between us. I had decided to go for a walk outside the city and had jumped the wall. I’d done this hundreds, maybe thousands of times by then, but that day a guard was passing by and grabbed me, mistaking me for an escaping slave.