“No.”
So it was possible her servants had the upper hand, like Zivar’s. Parvaneh passed the trunk to a young man, then straightened her back and lowered her eyes, putting on a proper demeanor like a cloak. “Would you care to refresh yourselves before breakfast?”
“Yes, thank you,” I said. She wasn’t as skittish as most slaves of sorceresses…of course, we were on foreign ground here. Maybe she was a freeborn servant and not a slave at all. She showed us directly to a privy, then to a small bath house where we could wash our faces and hands with cool water and scented soap. Then we followed her through a garden to a room of polished wood and indigo linen. A large fan of woven rushes and huge feathers hung on the wall. Parvaneh took it down, held it up, and waited. The fan leapt lightly from her hand, hovered a moment, then began to fan us. A djinn, no doubt. The breeze gave only a little relief from the heat.
Parvaneh bowed. “I will return in a moment with some refreshment for you,” she said.
As soon as the door closed, Alibek rose to glare at the fan. “That’s a djinn,” he said.
“Yes.” Janiya, sitting on the couch, barely glanced up.
“Is it listening to us?”
“Probably,” I said. “They aren’t very good spies, but the Weaver could have it repeat our conversation word for word. At least it’s fanning us while it’s listening.”
“What if we wanted it to stop?”
“Ask it to stop and see what happens,” I said.
“What if it won’t start again? It’s hot.” Alibek moved a little closer to the fan, to see what the djinn would do. It backed the fan up so it wouldn’t brush against him. When he’d backed the djinn all the way to the wall, it flipped the fan up to the ceiling, sailed it across the room, and then set to work fanning us from the other side.
“Leave it alone, Alibek,” Janiya said. “It’s a slave. Would you harass a human slave?”
Alibek sat down. Janiya paced, then moved over and said quietly in my ear, “I did as you asked.”
It took me a moment to think of what she might be talking about. Xanthe. “It worked?”
Janiya’s eyes were shadowed. “She can’t be trusted,” she said.
“Why?”
“I can’t explain right now. But—do not rely on her.”
Parvaneh came back, trailed by a half dozen young girls carrying platters and pitchers. They had a pot of tea, a basket of fruit, a platter of cold meat, a platter of cheese, another basket of freshly cooked rounds of thin bread, a spread made from beans mashed with spices, and a silver pitcher. With a hint of a flourish, Parvaneh picked up the pitcher and filled three tall cups, handing them to each of us. I took a sip. It was some sort of juice, but cold like water from a stream. Colder. Parvaneh smiled at my shocked look. “One of the aerika fetches snow down from the mountain each morning, and we keep it in our cellar. Rhea finds chilled drinks refreshing in the summer.”
A djinn to fan guests, another to fetch snow…There was a purpose to Rhea’s fondness for luxury. It was a way to show her power. She had so many djinni at her disposal that she could use them for her whims. I wondered how many of these djinni were bound by Rhea, and how many were bound by her apprentices. Probably most were bound by her apprentices, just like Hypatia’s.
The basket of fruit held plums, grapes, and several fruits I didn’t recognize, including one that looked like a stubby yellow finger. One of the young girls noticed me looking at it. She deftly stripped the peel off for me, then sliced it and put it on a plate. I had to at least try it after that. It was sweet, but had a strange, pasty texture—not juicy, like I’d expected. I washed it down with some of the cold juice and took some bread and cheese.
As we finished our breakfast, we heard a rumble somewhere far away. It grew louder, to a distant roar. Janiya leapt up. “Earthquake,” she said. “Get outside—hurry!”
The djinn continued to wave the fan back and forth as we bolted out to the courtyard. Then we paused. I listened, but heard nothing more. The ground was still. I looked at Janiya. She shook her head. “I don’t know what else it could have been…”
We waited a little longer. Beyond the wall, I could hear noise from the street—people coming out, talking excitedly. Looking up, I thought I saw the glimmer of djinni as every sorceress in the neighborhood sent one out to see what was going on. I looked around the courtyard. One of Rhea’s slaves was scrubbing tile. “What was that noise?” I asked her. She gave me a mute shrug and went back to scrubbing.
“Excuse me.” Parvaneh had come out looking for us. “If you are done with breakfast, Rhea would like you to come up to her receiving room.”
We followed Parvaneh inside and upstairs. “What was that noise?” I asked.
“I have never heard a noise quite like that before,” Parvaneh said. “I don’t know what it was, but I trust we’ll learn soon enough. Here we are…” We’d reached a closed door. She knocked twice, waited for a muffled answer from the other side, and swung it open.
I had expected to see just Rhea and Hypatia. Instead, a half dozen women sat around a table. Though I assumed they were all “Younger Sisters,” not all were young. One had a deeply lined face, and another had white hair. Rhea held the box of karenite that Hypatia had set aside back in Daphnia. She opened it and laid out the six stones on the table. They caught the sunlight shining through the gauzy linen curtains.
“What is it you are offering, exactly, and what do you want in return?” Rhea asked.
I looked at Janiya—she was the leader, after all—but she gestured for me to go ahead. So I took a deep breath and stepped forward. “The Alashi are offering an alliance with the Younger Sisters. We’ll supply you with karenite. In exchange—well, we know you’re plotting against the Sisterhood of Weavers. We want you to move against them—now.”
“Now?” Rhea raised an eyebrow. “Today? Tomorrow?”
“Soon. They’re moving against us, you see. If we’re to continue providing you with karenite, we need them distracted.”
“And if we do move against them—if we overthrow them—then what? Will you continue to send us karenite?”
“We’ll sell it to you directly.”
“Exclusively to us?”
I glanced at Janiya, and she gave me a slight nod. “Yes,” I said.
The women at the table exchanged glances. There was a pause.
“We would need karenite before we could move against the Sisterhood,” Hypatia said. “A great deal of it, in order to make spell-chains. We could not move against them today, or even next week.”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” I said.
Hypatia turned her palms up in a silent shrug.
“Can you get us more karenite?” one of the other sorceresses asked. “Say…five hundred pieces?”
Janiya stepped forward. “You ask for much, and promise nothing,” she said. “We gave Hypatia what we had with us, and she handed most of it over to the Temple of Athena in Daphnia. We have no more here, far from the steppe.”
I saw a flicker from the corner of my eye: a djinn. Rhea saw it, too, and I saw her look toward it, then back to me. She gestured to Parvaneh, starting to say something about talking more later, but was interrupted by the djinn.
“The noise you sent me to investigate was the sound of the Temple of Athena collapsing,” it said.
There were gasps from around the table. “How?” Hypatia asked.
“The gate freed the bound ones that held up the temple roof.”
“Where is she now?” Rhea whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Go look,” she said venomously. The shimmer in the air disappeared.
“It’ll never find her…” Hypatia said.
“I don’t care. I want it looking. Those fools,” she muttered. “I thought Ensiyeh at least would have the sense…” Her voice trailed off, and her eyes focused on me. Her lips tightened. “We’ll discuss your proposal more later,” she said. “The servants will show you back downstairs.”
>
I followed Parvaneh back to the room where we’d waited. The snap of her fingers brought a girl with a fresh basket of fruit and another chilled pitcher of juice. Parvaneh poured us drinks, though I thought she was almost as distracted by the news as I was.
The gate. That was Lauria, I thought.
And it sounded like she’d gotten away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LAURIA
Zivar’s palanquin smelled funny—she didn’t use it much, and it had a musty odor. It was crowded full of all the strange things she’d thrown in for her trip. The basket of carefully packed food was no doubt her servants’ doing; the uneven pile of notebooks no doubt Zivar’s. The pillows were practical, but she’d put in so many you could barely see the rug on the floor. I had no idea why she had brought a silver pitcher, a freshly dug rosebush, or the huge seashell she normally used when she was working on a spell-chain. I arranged myself around the clutter. Xanthe, beside me, sat bolt upright, looking terrified.
“Are we being followed?” I asked.
Zivar pulled a spell-chain out from under her gown; she clasped it for a moment and murmured under her breath. “One approaches,” she said a moment later.
I’m only going to have one chance, I thought. Either they’re sending it to kill me, or they’re sending it to grab me and bring me back so that another one can kill me. I looked around wildly—they could be hard to see in daylight. But in the curtained interior of the palanquin, I saw its light, and as it lunged for me I had the momentary impression of a face. It’s here to kill me, I thought. I flung my hands out and hissed the words to banish it.
It has begun, it said before it vanished to the other side.
The palanquin was very quiet when I returned to myself. Xanthe and Zivar were both staring at me. “Lauria,” Zivar said. “I’m going to just call you Lauria, and not Xanthe—I think it would be rather confusing to call you Xanthe, seeing as you brought along a Xanthe, don’t you agree? What did you just do?”
“I freed it,” I said.
“The aeriko?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how,” I said. “There is a gate. Inside me. That’s what the djinni—aerika—all say. When I touch them, they can return to where they came from, even if they’re bound.” I glanced at Xanthe; her face was rigid and unreadable. “This is why the Sisterhood wanted me dead. This is why they thought they needed to kill me in some unusual way. Apparently there have been people who could do this before.”
Zivar chewed on her lower lip, her eyes glinting. “They must be terrified of you,” she said.
“They are,” Xanthe said softly.
“I heard murmurs of this even last winter,” Zivar said. “When your old master’s aerika disappeared. Then more talk, after you left. There have been people with gates within them before. Their deaths caused difficulties.”
Xanthe raised her head. “They were going to have an aeriko kill her,” she said.
“That wouldn’t have worked,” I said. “Nothing ever works twice.”
“How do you know about this?” Xanthe asked.
I shrugged. “I…the djinni showed me one night.”
“Can you close the gate?” Xanthe asked.
“It only opens when I will it,” I said. “Zivar’s aeriko isn’t going to slip through and let the palanquin fall.” Zivar cackled a little at that.
“More are going to be coming,” Zivar said. “They can’t just let you get away.” She fished a half dozen more spell-chains out from under her gown; they glittered in her palm as she murmured something under her breath. “Might as well make it hard for them,” she said. “I told my aerika to hurry it up, and to take a circuitous route. We’ll try to lose them, or outrun them.”
Xanthe looked pale and tense; her knees were drawn up against her chest. She didn’t want to meet Zivar’s eyes, or look at anyone else.
“Thank you,” I said. “Without you, I’d be dead.”
Xanthe let out a grim little chuckle and said nothing.
“Why did you help me?”
Her jaw worked and she lowered her eyes to stare at the rug under her feet. “My mother…Janiya appeared to me the other night, in my dream.” She fell silent.
“Did she ask you to help me?”
“No, actually. She just said she was sorry she’d left me. She cried, and wanted to kiss me, but I didn’t let her. I wanted to ask her more questions, but then the dream slipped away. I thought I’d ask you more questions instead, but then I found out they were planning to kill you that day. If I ever wanted a chance to question you more, I had to get you away, so that’s what I did. It was an impulse.” A stupid impulse. I swore I could hear the unsaid words echoing in her thoughts. “If I’d stopped to think, I’d have known the price was too high.”
“You did the right thing,” Zivar said. Xanthe turned her miserable eyes on Zivar, who was tucking her spell-chains back into her gown. “Their plan wouldn’t have worked. Also, Lauria is a nice person. Saving her life was a good thing.”
I guess I’m glad to hear you say that, I thought, and swallowed hard, thinking about how easily Zivar could let me be killed. I looked back at Xanthe, doubting her story. Could she really have gotten me out of the Koryphe entirely on her own? I thought I remembered a guard who’d turned away, and surely that secret door would ordinarily have been guarded? But perhaps the guards were so loyal to each other they’d do each other favors, without asking questions. When Janiya was a young guard, I thought she might have been willing to leave a door unguarded for a minute or two, “accidentally,” if asked by a friend.
“If Janiya had asked me to save you, I’d have let you die,” Xanthe muttered.
“Someone is coming,” Zivar said.
I leaned out and looked. Another palanquin was approaching. “It’s a sorceress,” I said, pulling my head back in.
“You don’t have to be a sorceress to ride in a palanquin,” Zivar said. “I believe there are guards in that palanquin, with orders to seize you. Human guards, who can’t be banished with a touch.” She fingered her spell-chains again, and this time spoke aloud, so that I—not just the djinni—could hear her. “Keep us away from that palanquin. They’re here for Lauria, for your gate. If you want her to stay safe, you’d better keep us away.” She tucked the spell-chains back into her dress. “We’ll see how much they want to protect you, now, won’t we?”
There was no discernible change—though in the shuttered box of the palanquin, it was hard to tell how fast we were moving. I looked out. “They’re getting closer,” I said.
“We are outnumbered and cannot outrun,” something hissed in my ear, and I nearly leapt to my feet before realizing it had the voice of a djinn. “We can outmaneuver.”
Another voice spoke. “We will protect you. Trust us.”
“And hold on tight.”
I looked at Zivar, who arched one eyebrow and said nothing.
I looked out again. We were almost side by side. Someone was pulling back the curtains of the other palanquin; and Zivar had been right—I could see women, guards, crowded inside. Then one reached out for us, and our palanquin shot suddenly upward. I heard the guardwoman’s scream as she plummeted, and I hoped her death didn’t free one of Zivar’s djinni. Surely not. It just moved the palanquin, it never touched her… And Zivar didn’t collapse screaming and dying to the floor of the palanquin, so apparently not.
They were approaching again, this time from below. One of them shot something like an arrow at us, a rope trailing behind. An anchor. It was deflected by one of the djinni—as were the next dozen that were shot at us.
Xanthe’s hands were gripped into fists against the pillow she was sitting on. Her knuckles were white.
Another hail of arrows started—this time, they were fire arrows, and one of them found its way past the djinni and landed inside the palanquin. Xanthe jumped up and smothered the flame with one of the pillows. “Send a djinn to steal the arrows,” I said to
Zivar.
Zivar nodded, her hands already twisting the spell-chains. “Are you going to fire them back down?” she asked.
I hadn’t really thought about it. “I could try…I’m not very good with a bow. But if we take their arrows, they can’t fire any more at us.”
The djinn returned with a whirl of bits and pieces—arrows, bows, an extinguished torch, the grappling hooks—and set them in a tangle on the rug of our palanquin. “Steal the rest of their equipment, too,” I suggested. “Whatever they’ve got that the djinn can take without hurting anyone…”
This time, the djinn returned with a larger pile—swords, helmets, pillows and rugs, even—to my shocked amusement—a spell-chain, which Zivar snatched up and added to her own collection, summoning the djinn a moment later to her side. I watched for another djinn—surely, I thought, they’d send one to try to get their stuff back. Yes. There it was, and in a breath, I was able to lay hands on it and send it away.
“It’s slowing down,” Xanthe said, looking out of our palanquin. “Falling behind.”
“Let’s come around for one more pass,” I said. “If we pass underneath, I can free the djinni that are carrying the palanquin.”
“No!” Xanthe sat bolt upright, horrified. “These are friends of mine. People I know—you can’t, please…”
I bit my lip and didn’t argue. “Zivar. Your new spell-chain—have that djinn carry them safely to the ground, so they aren’t hurt. Is that all right?” I looked at Xanthe. She nodded and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “They won’t be hurt. Now take us in under them…”
There were four djinni left. Zivar’s djinn brought us up under the other palanquin; looking out, I could see them, but they were out of my reach. “We can’t go any closer,” Zivar said. “Do you need to free them?”
“If I do, they can’t follow us to see where we go,” I said. Holding my breath and keeping my eyes away from the ground, I leaned out the door, grabbed the roof of the palanquin, and hoisted myself onto it. Then I crawled to the center. It was canvas, drawn tight over the ribs of the frame; it easily held my weight. But the djinni were still just out of my reach. I have to hurry and do this before the guards realize I’m standing right under them. My stomach lurched as I let go. We were moving faster than the swiftest horse, but the palanquin was at least the size of a large wagon. Even if I fall down, I’ll just fall onto the canvas again. Not all the way to the ground. I wanted to crawl to the edge and peer over the side before I committed myself, but that would have been stupid, and I knew it. I have to do this, or coming out here was awfully stupid. I didn’t fall when I let go, and I’m not going to fall when I stand up.
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