That evening, Uljas fed spoonfuls of honey to Burkut until Burkut turned his face away and closed his eyes. In the dim light of the tent, I watched as Uljas covered Burkut with the blankets, tucking them in gently around him for extra warmth. There was a faint tender smile on Uljas’s lips as long as Burkut was looking at him, but once Burkut’s eyes were closed, his face slipped into bleak despair. A tear dripped down his cheek; he turned his face away so that it wouldn’t drip on his friend, and he swallowed his sobs so that Burkut wouldn’t hear him.
Looking at Uljas, I knew what I should have known looking at Burkut: Burkut was dying.
We kept riding, because what else could we do?
To add to Burkut’s misery, winter was truly approaching. None of us left the tent at night; sunny days were still cold, and cloudy days were truly miserable. My hands were stiff inside my mittens and the warmth from the fire never seemed to get deeply enough into my bones to truly warm me. We needed somewhere to stay for the winter. Somewhere with four walls and a roof. Uljas was right; we were not Alashi, and we didn’t know how to live on the steppe through the winter.
Each morning, Uljas would wake Burkut as gently as he could, and as soon as he was out of bed, Tamar would step behind the yurt to shake out the blankets, to keep him from seeing all the hair he’d left behind. Uljas helped him mount his horse, and helped him dismount when we would stop to rest. I’d bring out the honey when we stopped to let the horses graze. “Eat all you like, we can always buy more,” I said each day. Later, when we had dinner, I would stir olive oil into Burkut’s lentils before giving them to Uljas. “This will put some meat on your bones,” Uljas said each night as he settled down to feed Burkut his dinner. Burkut struggled to sit up and said, “The Alashi eat the slaves who come to them, haven’t you heard? I want to stay thin, deny those nasty bandits a good meal.” Uljas would chuckle and say, “Don’t you worry about that. Anyone who eats you will die poisoned from your bad attitude.”
Burkut made it to the very threshold of the steppe. We were well beyond Helladia, the last outposts of the Greeks; the wind battered at our tent at night. On the last morning before I thought we’d be able to say that we’d made it, Uljas was unable to wake him. He was still breathing—I could feel his breath on my hand when I held it under his nose—but even shaking him brought no response. “We’re almost there, Burkut,” Uljas said in his ear. “We’re so close.” When nothing woke him, Uljas wrapped him in his blankets and carried him in his arms to rest in the sun. In early afternoon he put him down, cold and still. The wind whipped across the plain, but Burkut no longer felt it.
Silently, Uljas gathered together a bag of food and water. I thought perhaps he would want to bury Burkut, but instead, I realized as he tested the load he’d decided to carry, he was going to take Burkut’s body with him. To be buried by the Alashi, I supposed.
“We can take you closer,” I said, but he gave me a look of such venom that I fell silent. I watched with Tamar as he finished gathering a bundle together and then came over to face us.
He stared into my face for a long moment. I wanted to say something like, This wasn’t my fault, or Please forgive me, or The Alashi will be lucky to have you, but instead I swallowed hard and looked back at him. He took a half-step back and then punched me in the stomach as hard as he could. I fell down, gasping for breath; Tamar grabbed him before he could hit me again. She managed to knock him away from me, and then drew her knife. She wasn’t very good at close-quarters fighting, but she had a knife and he didn’t, and he fell back a step.
“If I ever see you again,” he said to me, “I am going to kill you.”
He picked up his bundle, and Burkut’s body, and walked away across the plain.
It took me awhile to catch my breath. The ribs that had been broken last summer ached anew, and it felt like something had been bruised deep inside me. By the time the ache in my gut had mostly subsided, Uljas was gone.
“Let’s mount up,” I said to Tamar, my voice still hoarse. “We can ride Alashi-style now, and switch mounts when the horses get tired. It’ll make things go a lot faster.”
The darkness around our camp seemed very empty that night; Tamar avoided my eyes as she tended the campfire, making me feel even lonelier.
“We need to find somewhere to spend the winter,” she said. “We were lucky the weather stayed nice as long as it did. It’s going to snow soon.”
I nodded.
“Who’s left?” she asked.
“Prax. Thais. Sophos’s harem.” My head ached. “Prax is probably already dead. Thais is months of travel to the south. And I still have no idea how we’re going to free Sophos’s harem.” I had a blanket wrapped around me; as I shifted, some of Burkut’s hair, still caught in the fold of the blanket, slipped into the fire. It sizzled and smoked. “It doesn’t matter who’s left.”
Tamar opened her mouth to say something, then paused. A few minutes later, she said, “Human lives aren’t beads on a string, you know. It’s not like you can collect all five and just be done with it.”
“I know that,” I said, and found myself blinking back tears. Rescuing Nika had gone so perfectly. She’d still wanted freedom, I’d gotten her out so easily, and she’d been strong and willing and had forgiven me. Was it so much to hope for, that this could happen four more times?
A gust of wind made our campfire flicker and flare wildly. “I hate to say this,” Tamar said, “but we should wait until spring for the harem. It could snow, really snow, any day now. They’ll be safe and warm where they are. If a storm starts while we’re walking north, we could all die.” She tapped her finger against the side of her bowl. “Prax, though . . .”
“If he’s even still alive, I still don’t know how we’re going to free him, either.” I batted at the tears in my eyes, embarrassed. Why are you crying now? Nothing has changed. Burkut’s face swam into my mind’s eye, sunken and wasted; I thought of his smile, the smile he summoned from the last of his reserves when he looked at Uljas. My stomach ached, and I covered my face with my hands, trying to stop the tears.
Tamar looked down. “Could we make it to the city where Thais was sold, before the snow got too deep to travel?”
“Casseia?” I drew a deep, shaky breath, and tried to think about that for a minute. “Maybe. It’s where the Oxus turns south . . .”
“The what?”
I looked up at her, surprised that she didn’t know this. “The Oxus is what the Greeks call the Amu Darya. The second of the two great rivers.”
“I thought it didn’t flow anymore, like the Syr Darya.”
“No, it just doesn’t flow in its old course. The Sisterhood of Weavers used djinni to bottle up the Syr in a valley in the mountains. I’ve never seen the reservoir, but I’ve heard stories. With the Oxus—the Amu Darya—they had djinni construct a channel to turn it south. They built a tunnel under the mountains. The waters flow down toward Persia now. Casseia is the regional capital for that part of the Empire. Daphnia is also a regional capital, but Casseia is a new city—every brick, stone, and hinge put there since the rivers were bound.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Kyros took me there once.”
“Did you ride there?”
“We were guests of a sorceress. She sent a palanquin.” I’d been very young then, even younger than Tamar was now—it was perhaps a year after Kyros took me into his service. I had been fascinated by every detail of the trip, from the silk covering the seats of our palanquin to the splash of the fountain in the sorceress’s courtyard. “It was warmer there, which will be nice this time of year, but it’s a long way away.”
“I don’t think we can free Thais and bring her up to the steppe until spring. But we have to winter somewhere. We’ve got four riding horses and a packhorse—we ought to be able to travel pretty fast. Do you think we can do it? When you say months, are you taking all our horses into account?”
I thought about it, calculating days and distances. “If we buy g
rain, so that we don’t have to spend so much time grazing the horses . . . with the extra horses for remounts . . .” Without Burkut to slow us down . . . “You know, I think it would actually take us less than a month. We could do it.”
Tamar nodded thoughtfully. Another gust of wind made her shiver, and she said, “Maybe we should go after Prax first.” I started to ask her how in all of Zeus’s lost hell I was supposed to manage that, and she went on. “You could just buy him. Better that than leaving him down where he is.”
I thought this over, staring into the black night beyond the embers of the fire. The mine slaves probably slept at the bottom of the mine. I wondered what they used for light—lanterns? Oil lamps?—and whether they ever saw daylight. I wondered how cold it was, under the ground.
“If we ride up and say we want to buy a slave, they’ll be suspicious,” I said. “Especially if we insist on seeing the slaves that are normally down under the ground.”
“Can we pay them enough money that they wouldn’t care?”
“We’re running out of money,” I said. But I was thinking up a story, even as I said that. We could say we were merchants, if they asked—representatives of a larger caravan who’d split off. We’d had to leave our slaves behind when we crossed Alashi territory, but now that we were back in Greek territory we wanted someone to do the nastier chores, and the sooner the better. We wanted to see the slaves from the bottom of the pit because we thought they’d be stronger. Or because we thought they’d be so grateful to be out that they wouldn’t try to run away.
They’ll still be suspicious.
But I have to try.
“Do you know which mine he’s in?” Tamar asked.
“I know where he used to be. If he’s still alive.”
“Well, let’s go there and free him next, then. Even though we have to buy him. Because Meruert and Jaran and the rest will live until spring. Prax might die.” Like Burkut, she didn’t have to add. “I know, I said that they’re not beads on a string, but I know how much it means to you. You could free a hundred others, but if you can’t free the ones you sent back to slavery . . .”
I nodded and didn’t say anything, because I could feel the tears still hovering at the back of my mouth, and I hated crying.
It took us another day of riding to get close to the mine. As we approached, I tried to straighten my shoulders and look like Kyros’s most trusted servant again, instead of a harried fugitive. I looked at Tamar. She still looked like a defiant slave girl, but I thought she’d probably always look to me like a defiant slave girl. She didn’t look that way to anyone in Daphnia. Of course, they immediately guessed that we were rogue karenite suppliers . . .
When I’d visited the iron mine with Sophos, I’d felt the heat from the furnace to purify the iron. This was a gemstone mine, not an iron mine; I felt no heat as we approached. Also, the iron mine had an open camp around the hillside, spilling out from the entrance to the mine. Here, there was a brick wall surrounding everything, and a tower by the gate with a guard standing watch. Shit. Well, I might as well give it a try. I didn’t see any good way to break him out . . .
“Stop!” the guard shouted as I approached. “What do you want?”
I held out my empty hands. “Is this a bad time?” I asked.
The guard signaled for another to take his place, and came down from the tower and through the gate, out to the road. He was lean and twitchy; one hand kept straying to the hilt of his sword, while the other worried at the edge of his belt. “Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Xanthe and this is my associate Zosima,” I said, indicating Tamar. “We’re with a group of merchants and we’d like to buy a slave.”
“Does this look like the Elpisia market?”
“Well, no,” I said. “But are you sure you won’t sell us one? We’ll make it worth your while.”
“We’re always buying, never selling,” the guard said, and turned away.
“But—” But I didn’t even get to use the story I came up with to explain why we need a slave.
“But what?” He whirled back to face me, giving me a look that chilled me even more than the wind.
“Nothing,” I said, falling back a step.
“That’s what I thought,” he said, and stomped back through the gate, slamming it shut.
“Elpisia is only a couple of days away,” the other guard called down as we walked away. “There are always slaves in the marketplace there. Buy extras. Bring some up here. We’re always buying!”
Our fire that night was small; we were running low on fuel. We huddled close to the flames in silence, and moved inside the tent as soon as we were done cooking our food. I shivered in the darkness, counting my failures again and again. Burkut is dead. Uljas will never forgive me. I have no idea how I’ll free Prax and I don’t know if I’ll even be able to find Thais. I don’t know how I’ll keep my promise to Tamar, and free Sophos’s harem.
It’s not that I expected this to be easy. But I thought it would be possible.
The darkness of the tent made me think again about the darkness at the bottom of the mine. I condemned him to that. Prax was one of the ones who probably would have gotten away, if it hadn’t been for me. He’d had the knife; he’d had water, as well, and a little food, and he’d even stolen some boots. He’d planned his escape well. Prax could have made it. He would have made it. Now . . . I didn’t know if he was even still alive.
I felt cold fingers against my cheek, and when I flinched away, Tamar muttered an apology and stroked my hair instead. “I think the djinni will forgive us our failures if we attempt with a good heart,” she whispered.
But Prax is still in darkness.
Darkness.
I wasn’t in the tent. It was colder, and the ground underneath me was harder. Prax’s mine. I stood up and looked around. There was a light burning, an oil lamp, that cast just enough light that I could see the huddled bodies at my feet, dozens of people wrapped in blankets and sleeping a thin, exhausted sleep. A strange smell nearby made my nostrils burn and my eyes water. There were no guards. At the bottom of the mine there was nowhere to escape to, and in the middle of the night, there was no need to make them work.
Someone stirred and sat up; he limped over to a bucket in the corner and peed into it, then stumbled back to his place and lay down to sleep again. His eyes were hollow, but I recognized the cast of his jaw. Prax was alive. He might die before spring, before I could come and try—somehow—to get him out, but if I was seeing truth with this dream, he was at least still alive.
I wanted to shake him by the shoulder and tell him that I was going to come for him, but when I put my arm against his he didn’t move. I had as little substance here as a cloud. I leaned as close to his ear as I could and spoke into it. “I’m coming for you, Prax. I swear before the djinni, I swear by Prometheus and Arachne, I am coming for you. I will get you out of here. No matter what it takes, no matter what I have to do.”
His eyes were open, and he turned his head as if he’d heard me. For a moment our eyes met. “I’m coming for you,” I said. “I swear to you, Prax. I will get you out of here.”
CHAPTER SIX
We broke camp quickly in the morning; I’d had many disturbing dreams over the last half year, but this one truly felt like it had sunk talons into my heart. Looking into Prax’s eyes in the mine, my vow was the only thing I had that I could offer him. But I still had no idea how I was going to get him out, and in the daylight I found myself thinking that this only meant I would add vow-breaking to my list of crimes.
If only I had a spell-chain, I thought. Then this would be easy. Well, maybe not easy, but possible. To free Prax and the harem slaves both. We could even have it carry us to Casseia to look for Thais. As I saddled the horses, I thought about the spell-chain that lay broken and useless in Saken’s grave. Kyros had owned two, but I’d freed both those djinni, and I had no idea if the Sisterhood had given him another one. Sophos owned one. If we could kill Sophos and
take his spell-chain . . . I shook my head. Sophos had guards, walls, friends, weapons. Tamar and I had walked out once, because our escape had been arranged in advance—or mine had, and they couldn’t stop Tamar without stopping me. Getting in and committing murder—well, if it were that easy, more slaves would kill their masters.
Krina sniffed at my hair as I saddled her, and snuffled my hands to check for hidden treats. “I’ll try to find you apples once we’re back in civilized parts,” I murmured to her, stroking her neck. “We don’t have anything right now. I know, I know, you’ve given us your best and what do we have to offer you? Not even particularly fine grass.” She nuzzled my head a little anyway and let me tighten the girth of her saddle. Then she dipped her head to sniff at something on the ground; I looked and saw a glint of blue. Karenite. I snatched up the grayish rock and tilted it in my hand, back and forth: it was karenite, no question about it, a chunk the size of my thumbnail.
“What have you got there?” Tamar came over to look and her face lit up. “Well, so much for our money worries! There’s probably more near here. Gulim told me once that you tend to find it in clusters—like someone had dropped a clay pot onto stone, and the pieces had gone everywhere.”
We spent a little while hunting for it and came up with three more pieces. We each tucked two pieces into pouches under our clothes.
“Do you want to sell these when we get to Casseia, or earlier?”
“Casseia,” I said. “We’ve got enough money to get down there, and I don’t want to stop in Daphnia.”
“If we can sell it without getting caught, that will easily be enough to live on during the winter. Surely we’ll be able to find Thais and free her once it’s warm enough to travel again. I think we should have a cover story this time, though.”
I was already thinking about this. “Gems,” I said. “I grew up over a gem-cutter’s shop, I even know something about gemstones. I’ll buy some on the way down . . .”
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