Freedom s Sisters

by Naomi Kritzer

  “It’s…not supposed to. That was forgotten so that it could not be done again.”

  “And the gate. Who built it? Ancient shamans? It couldn’t have been the sorceresses…they drowned it.”

  Kasim offered a new image. I saw a Danibeki man laying bricks made of karenite. Complete, the gate opened into darkness. I wondered what he had thought he was building. Of course, djinni had been around for centuries before the Sisterhood of Weavers had had the idea of binding them, making them slaves…

  The image faded like mist as I pulled my hand away. The sorceresses drowned the gate, I realized. They can use the gate whether it’s drowned or not—everyone from our side who comes to the borderland sends their spirit through that gate.

  They had always told us that the Sisterhood of Weavers flooded our ancestral lands because our ancestors fought them. It was a lie. They were hiding the gate.

  “If someone destroyed the gate,” I asked, my voice shaking a little bit, “could the rift be closed?”

  Kasim shrugged, but his face was intrigued. “Maybe,” he said.

  I remembered Zhanna telling me there were many gates, but sorcery, at least, depended on the gate at the bottom of the reservoir. Without that gate, there would be no more spell-chains. There would probably be no more shamans.

  Unless the djinni killed me here and built their own gate. Then there would be spell-chains, with us as unwilling servants.

  I have to get back.

  Near me, I saw a shimmer in the air. One of us. Kasim looked at it. “Shaman,” he said. I was certain he was right—it didn’t pursue Kasim and, anyway, it lacked the brilliant power lent by a spell-chain. I squinted, and thought I could see the outline of a man. He bowed toward Kasim.

  I approached him; he gave no sign of recognition. After a few minutes another shimmer broke into the air. He had brought someone into the borderland with him. I didn’t recognize either of them. They conferred silently for a while, then one vanished abruptly. I seized the other, or tried to, knotting my hands around his wrists in an attempt to follow him back to my own side. But it was like trying to lay hands on smoke. He was there, and then he wasn’t; I was on my knees on the dark hillside. Or I would have been on my knees if I’d had a proper body here. Smoke, indeed.

  I drifted back to Kasim. “It didn’t work,” I said. “Show me how your people do it.” I held out my hands.

  Kasim touched his palm to mine. I saw a dark hillside, and the sparkle of the visitor; the djinn and the visitor clasped hands, and vanished together. The shaman saw the djinn. They don’t see me. Perhaps that’s the problem? But then he showed me a djinn clasping the ankle of a visitor, following him back like a burr caught on his clothing. That’s what I tried to do…

  Another sparkle, in the distance. I flew toward it: it was a woman, again a shaman, but again no one I knew. When I thought she was about to leave, I threw myself toward her, wrapping arms and legs around her. I might as well have flung myself against moonlight or mist.

  “How would they even have killed me?” I asked Kasim, settling down next to him again. “I’m not solid here. I don’t know how someone would kill a djinn, in my own world…”

  Kasim raised his hand for a moment, and I started to reach to touch him, but he pulled away; he just wanted my silence. “The singing,” he said.

  “It would have made me solid? For long enough to be killed?”

  “Yes.”

  The sky was growing lighter; soon I could see the sun break over the edge of the eastern mountains, like the morning when I’d watched with Zivar and Xanthe. The sky was clear today—a perfect blue. I should be able to feel the sun’s warmth, I thought; I felt neither warm nor cold, just as I felt neither hungry nor tired. I want to go home.

  Kasim rose, suddenly. “Come,” he said, and began to walk deeper into the mountains, away from the city. His face was alive with sudden fear.

  “What is it?” I asked, and he gestured for silence. Very faintly, beyond the sounds of birdsong and wind, I heard humming.

  Were we already surrounded? I touched Kasim’s hand, trying to find out what he thought, but he was too afraid to be coherent. He seemed to want me to stay with him, but I wasn’t sure if this was because he thought he could protect me, or because he thought I could protect him.

  Fly, or stay? I looked at Kasim’s terrified face, and knew that abandoning him, after he had saved me, was wrong. It might be better, but it would still be wrong. I had never yet regretted saving Tamar from the bandits…I stayed by his side.

  Tamar, I thought. Tamar was home; Tamar was who I wanted to return to. I rubbed the scar on my palm.

  Perhaps it was my thoughts of Tamar that drew her to me when she came through. I didn’t see her come through, and when I saw her and Alibek, I didn’t recognize them right away. I saw two spirits, and knew they must not be sorceresses, since the sorceresses never came through in pairs, ever. Even distracted by the humming—still faint, but growing louder—I paused for a moment to look. If the humming made me solid enough to kill, it seemed unlikely that I’d be able to slip through to the other side like a djinn.

  Then one of the spirits took form: the outline of a man, flickering every now and then into the outline of a songbird. Alibek.

  I need to make him see me.

  He is not here alone. Could the other person be Tamar? I studied the other spirit: after a moment or two she also took form. Yes. It’s Tamar. “It’s people I know,” I hissed to Kasim. “Tamar.” I tried to grab her, and couldn’t. “Tamar. Alibek!”

  They didn’t notice Kasim, either. They were no doubt talking with each other.

  I tried again to grab Tamar. I tried to touch her hand, where she’d cut herself when we became blood sisters; I tried to touch her hair, which I’d helped her cut when we joined the Alashi. My hand passed through her, or she passed through me. I tried to grab Alibek. I nearly screamed in frustration.

  We still couldn’t see the singers, but the humming was growing louder.

  Alibek turned out, away from Tamar, and our eyes met. He could see me. I tried again to grasp his hand, to speak to him. “Listen, you need to help me. I know you hate me, but please believe, if you want to cut my throat once I’m back where I belong, it would be better than leaving me here…” He can’t hear a word I’m saying. But a moment later, Tamar turned. She saw me, and I saw her recognize me, but I was as intangible to her as to the djinni. “…in the underworld,” I heard her voice say. I shook my head frantically and held out my hands.

  “Take my hands, Tamar,” I said. “Please. If there is a way back, it will be with you.”

  Tamar held her hands out, and I tried again to grasp them, but I still felt nothing more tangible than air. “This has to work. This has to work, or there’s no way back…” And the humming… They were coming, I knew. They’ll build a new temple here—a shrine, to guard the gate… The humming was making me more solid, but Tamar was intangible here, so we still couldn’t touch.

  Let our oath bind us, I heard Tamar’s voice whisper in my mind, and suddenly I could feel her hands clasp mine.

  Go, I whispered back, and when nothing happened, I tightened my grip. Hurry.

  There was a jerk, and I felt a moment of intense cold. I can’t breathe—and then I was through. With Tamar, in body—in fact, I was lying on top of her. I rolled off her and scrambled to my feet, and realized that she was being held on her back, helpless, by a djinn. I touched it, and opened my gate. At last, I heard, and it was gone.

  I helped Tamar to her feet. “We’re in a prison cell in the Koryphe,” Tamar said. “Alibek is here, too. Your mother—they took her somewhere else. Everyone thinks you’re dead. I thought you were dead…oh, Lauria.” She gave me a tight hug.

  “I wasn’t dead,” I said. “But you got me out just in time.” Tamar was taller, and her hair had grown longer. I stepped back a half step to look into her face. No one would take her for a slave now. “A prison cell? Is there a way out?” If they used djinni
to hold the prisoners, did they still lock them in, or did the djinni make them careless? The cell door was barred.

  “There’s a spell-chain over there,” Tamar said, and pointed to the far wall. “That’s where they get the djinni to hold us.”

  No one had come to investigate our voices, and when I peered out, I saw no human guards. The spell-chain was out of reach, and cemented in somehow, not hanging loose from a chain. “Djinn,” I whispered, knowing they could hear me. “If any of you can open this door, and let me out, I will free all of you. I am the gate. You know what I can do.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then the bar of our cell slammed back with such force it almost broke the door. I touched the djinn and set it free, then unbarred the next cell. Alibek lay on the floor inside; I could see the djinn embracing him, like a haze of light. I freed the djinn; I could see Alibek relax, but it took a moment before he took the hand I offered him and scrambled to his feet.

  I picked up a piece of brick to smash the karenite, then hesitated. I was naked; we were in a prison. “I will help you, but I want you to help me. I need clothes. Tell me if there’s a guard at the door…”

  “Weapons,” Tamar said.

  “If you can bring us weapons without being noticed, do it.” I had been stumbling over my words, and now I backed up, to make the instructions more explicit, then shrugged. “If the Sisterhood Guard realizes that something’s wrong and comes down here to check on us, I’ll free you if I can, but I can’t promise I’ll have the chance. So don’t do anything to get us caught.”

  The djinn flickered away. A few minutes later, a shower of loose clothing fell at my feet, including a pair of sandals. There were no weapons. “The guardswomen would notice the theft of their swords,” it said. “The armory is locked, and the sound of the lock breaking would attract attention.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “No one waits by the doorway at the top of the stairs.”

  I glanced at Tamar and Alibek, trying to think if there was anything else I needed from the djinni before I freed them and we got out of here. “How did you end up here?” I asked Tamar.

  “Xanthe came for your mother. Alibek and I were brought along because we were with her. Janiya escaped.”

  Xanthe returned here. So what happened to Zivar? If they took my mother away, where is my mother? I felt something like heat rising inside of me, sending my thoughts scattering in a thousand directions at once, and tried to rein them in.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said. “But first, I need to keep my promise.” I picked up a piece of rock that had crumbled out of the wall, and turned to the spell-chain.

  “Wait—” Tamar said. “What if we need its help again?”

  “We can’t bring this spell-chain along,” I said. “And I don’t want to stay here.” I smashed the six soul-stones with the rock. When I was done, Tamar raised her hand to point silently at one more djinn hovering before us.

  “Do you need to free that one?” she asked.

  I knew, looking at it, that this was not a bound djinn—it was one of the others. I shook my head.

  “Maybe it can help us,” Tamar said.

  “We can’t trust them,” I said. It approached me, and I flinched away.

  Trust, I heard it whisper. Let me within.

  A rogue djinn, here and now—was it Kasim? Had Kasim followed me back? Or was this a trick—one of the ones who had lured me through the gate, trying even now to seize control, to drag me back to the other side to meet the death they’d so carefully planned for me? Surely it is Kasim. If this djinn wished me ill, he could possess me and I couldn’t stop him. Or could I? I’ve never heard of a shaman or a sorceress being unwillingly possessed by a djinn; perhaps they can’t be, and I can’t either.

  I closed my eyes, trying to listen to my own heart, and finally held out my hand. “Kasim?” I whispered.

  I felt a burst of heat; the djinn had passed within me. When they passed through me, through the gate in my heart, I had felt that heat, but only momentarily. For a moment now I felt as if I were being consumed. Is this how it feels to be possessed? Surely not. Then the heat eased, and I could hear Kasim’s voice within my head. The mingling of our thoughts here was not like it had been in the Silent Lands. There, I’d felt a chaotic rush of pictures and feelings when we touched, as if his memories were being poured into me like water out of a bucket. Here, I heard a voice in my head that was not my own. He spoke words, cool and measured; here, he could borrow them from me like a set of boots. His words were slow and careful, unlike the rest of my whirl of thoughts. It was tempting to push away my own madness and cling to whatever he said as if his words were my own rational thoughts. I still can’t trust him, I thought.

  Where is my mother? I asked Kasim. Where is Zivar?

  Kasim stirred. I can go look, he said, and I felt him slipping away. It felt rather like peeling away the dead skin from a healed burn—not painful, just odd.

  “He’s gone to look, hasn’t he?” Tamar asked. “Your eyes are different.” I nodded, remembering how Xanthe had always refused to meet my eyes.

  “What happened to you?” Alibek asked. “Tamar thought you were dead.”

  I told Alibek and Tamar about my escape with Xanthe and Zivar, our journey, the drowned passage and what I found on the other side. “They lured me there,” I said, finally. “I was their tool, to be used and discarded. By enticing me through, and killing me, they could use the gate in my heart as their own, anchored on their side of the borderland. We can’t trust them—we never could. They seek to make us their slaves, as we have made them ours.”

  Tamar listened, her eyes steady. “How did you find all that out?”

  “Someone told me—a djinn. Kasim. The one I freed from the spell-chain when we were with the sisterhood.”

  “Yet you trust him.”

  “Well—” I thought it over. “Yes,” I said. “I had helped him; he wanted to help me. He seemed to risk quite a lot, doing so. Judging by his fear.”

  Alibek said, “So what you’re saying is, the djinni have an empire of their own; they have the elite, powerful few and they have the many ordinary people who get by as they can, just like here.”

  I remembered the image Kasim had given me, of the free bread given to those who became prey to the sorceresses. “Yes,” I said.

  “And we can’t trust the djinni in charge.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “But ‘the djinni’ don’t all agree. Any more than we agree with the Sisterhood.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Sounds like what we heard Damira say,” Tamar said. “Except she called them the barley-eaters and the rice-eaters.”

  Kasim was back. I could not find your mother. But Zivar is not far—underground, like you, but with a human guard.

  “I don’t know if we can help her without weapons,” I said.

  “Does she have a guard?” Tamar said, anxiously. Kasim was speaking at the same time. I will seize the guard.

  “We can do this, then,” I said, and started to follow the directions Kasim was whispering.

  Tamar ran after me, catching my elbow. “What? Do what, and where are we going?”

  “We’re going to get Zivar,” I said. Tamar fell into step beside me, Alibek following behind, even as part of my mind—not Kasim’s part—said, she’s following me, and she doesn’t even know what I’m doing or why I think I’ll succeed, and I’m the crazy one? “This will work,” I assured her. It was too difficult to give her the whole explanation.

  We passed a stairway and went down another corridor. There was a light ahead, spilling out of an open doorway. It’s time, Kasim said, and I felt him leave again. When we reached the doorway, we saw that the guard had slumped to the floor, her eyes half-closed. The room was brightly lit with lamps. Inside, Zivar sat at a bare wooden table. There were jars of beads spilled out across it, and silver wire. She worked feverishly, twisting wire; the necklace was close to done, I realized. />
  “Zivar,” I said.

  She looked up: her eyes were wide and hungry, and she scanned first my face, then Tamar’s, then Alibek’s. “You can’t be here unless I’m dead,” she said, her voice shaky.

  “I’m not dead, and neither are you.” She was still sitting on her stool, and when I looked closer, I realized that she’d been chained to the wall, feet and wrists.

  “They took my spell-chains. All of them,” Zivar said.

  “And forced you to bind for them,” I said.

  “They said—ten, and they’d set me free. Ten.” She pushed her damp hair back from her face. “I considered refusing, but then thought that perhaps, perhaps, I’d have a chance to use one of the chains before they took it away, and escape.”

  “Is that the first?” I said.

  She shook her head. “Third,” she said.

  Alibek edged in to take a look. “That looks almost done,” he said. “Why don’t you finish it? The djinn will make it easier to get out of here.”

  “Isn’t there some other way?” Tamar asked. “Lauria, what about your friend who followed you back? Could he help us?”

  “Help us do what?” I asked, glancing at the guard. She had slid to the floor, and was slumped over, her eyes rolling back and a thread of drool coming from her mouth.

  “We had this idea to help the Alashi,” Tamar said. “It was a joke, but now, well, if we could actually do it…” She took a deep breath and went on. “If we kidnap Kyros and steal the spell-chain that binds the great river, we think the Sisterhood will think that Kyros stole it. I think I know where the spell-chain is. Janiya had a guess—we think it’s at the top of one of the really high towers, the ones you can only get into with a palanquin.”

  I shook my head. “A rogue djinn can’t carry a palanquin. The binding gives them their strength. Unbound, they have eyes and ears but not much more. They can’t do anything—well, other than possessing people.”

  “But when you freed him from the spell-chain, he moved the bandits…”

  “He still had the strength from the spell-chain, even though the binding had been broken.”