Freedom's Gate

by Naomi Kritzer

  I spent the day brooding about Nika and Melaina. She hadn’t recognized me, and that was a relief, but a great deal could still go wrong. I might be able to talk my own way out of trouble, but could I talk Nika’s way out? What would Nika’s owner do to her if she were caught running away again? What if he punished her by separating her from her daughter?

  I’ll tell them it was necessary to accomplish my mission. That after Alibek identified me, I thought that freeing a slave and bringing her to the steppe would give me a shot at winning back their trust. That I chose Nika because I knew she was in Elpisia, and because I knew she’d run once before, so she might be willing to do it again. I didn’t contact Kyros because I was afraid that their Shaman might be keeping an eye on me through the djinn—they don’t have spell-chains but sometimes the djinni will do favors for the Alashi shamans. And I have no idea what happened to the djinn that Kyros sent to talk to me, the one that never returned.

  Kyros had sent his djinn to try to persuade me, or threaten me, into continued service. I had touched the djinn and banished it like a Shaman would banish a troublesome rogue djinn — and though this djinn should have been bound to its spell-chain, it had returned somehow to its own world. Gate, it had hissed. I’d never had the chance to talk to Zhanna about this. There were a lot of things I wished I could talk about with Zhanna . . .

  I wrenched my thoughts back to my task. If they catch us, I’ll tell Kyros that he should let me and Nika and Melaina go again. He’ll want to know what story I’ll tell Nika to explain all this. I’ll say that I’ll tell her that I have a confederate in town who freed me, and that we killed the guards to get to her. I don’t think she’ll ask too many questions.

  I thought I could convince Kyros that I was telling the truth. He liked me. He trusted me. Just as I’d once liked and trusted him.

  And if he doesn’t, I can turn his own weapon on him: Father, I am your own blood; if you want me to trust you, you have to trust me. I wondered if Melaina was also Kyros’s child. My half-sister.

  Tamar wanted me to talk about the aborted rescue, so I told the story. “You should have brought me along,” she said. “You could have gotten me up on the roof.”

  “And then what?”

  “I could have gone down and talked to Nika.”

  “You wouldn’t have known what she looked like.”

  “I could have figured it out. You figured out where she was by eavesdropping.”

  “It doesn’t matter, this worked.”

  “You should bring me along tonight.”

  “Someone needs to wait with the horses.”

  We napped for a while, though I was too tense to sleep well. Once the sun went down, we walked back to Elpisia, leading the horses; it was too dark to ride. When we reached the wall, I left Tamar with the horses and climbed back over.

  Again, the streets were dark and mostly empty. I found a hidden spot to wait near the window and sat down. I couldn’t hear the voices of the people in the kitchen here, and I was tempted to move closer, but I stayed where I was. I’d told Nika what to do; I had to trust her to take care of her part.

  Then again, if she didn’t, how obligated should I feel to free her? If I made a good faith effort and failed, how many times did I have to try again? For Nika, I’ll have to try again. She wants it. If she doesn’t manage tonight, it’s because something kept her. But what about the others? What if the man who’d wept so bitterly now balked at the risk? How many times did honor demand that I return if someone was indecisive?

  I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

  The window was opening. I moved over to it just in time to see a pair of soldiers rounding the corner. Damn it to hell. I pushed the window shut again, hoping that Nika would get the message, and shrank back into the shadows; the soldiers continued past without stopping. My heart beat in my chest like a smith’s hammer. I waited for a few moments to be sure that they weren’t coming back. Then I started to knock on the window, but realized that I could hear the murmur of voices again. And damn again. Well, at least the soldiers hadn’t walked past as I was helping Nika and her daughter climb out the window. I waited, clenching my teeth and knotting my hands into fists.

  The window opened a crack, then swung wide. “Here,” Nika said, and swung a small body out the window. I took the little girl in my arms. She was surprisingly heavy. Nika climbed out after her. With a day’s warning, she’d also found a way to have cloaks for both her and the child. “We’d better run, they’ll be back in minutes,” she said. She took Melaina back and swung her up against her shoulder.

  We ran. Prometheus and Arachne, keep us from running into those soldiers again. Melaina clung to her mother, not complaining, and we made it to the wall without incident. I scrambled up first, took Melaina and gave Nika a hand up; then I jumped down, she lowered Melaina to my arms, and dropped down after me. “There are horses,” I said, and we found our way to Tamar.

  “You did it,” Tamar hissed, her eyes wide. We helped Nika up onto Tamar’s horse, and handed Melaina up to her; we’d lead the horses until it was light enough for the horses to see well.

  “We got them out. We still need to get away. The Greeks have horses, too.”

  “They sent only one person after me when I ran before,” Nika said.

  “If she comes after us again, we’ll kick her ass,” I said.

  Nika sucked in her breath and looked down at me from her seat on Tamar’s horse. She hadn’t looked at me closely before: the light had been poor, we’d been in a hurry. Now she really looked at me, full in the face, for the first time, and I saw fear in her eyes.

  Tamar reached up and clasped her hand. “Trust us,” she said. Nika looked down at her, and Tamar’s hand tightened on hers. “If that person—the person who came after you before—if she turns up, we will kick her ass.”

  Nika tightened her arms around Melaina and nodded once.

  Once the sky lightened to gray, Tamar and I mounted as well; Nika was small enough to ride double with Tamar, and Melaina rode with me. In the daylight I could see that she had dark curls and gray eyes; she was about three, I thought, old enough that Nika had probably been pregnant when she ran. I thought I could see Kyros in Melaina’s face. My half-sister? I always thought myself an only child. It occurred to me with a jolt that Kyros’s wife alone had eight children.

  We pushed the horses hard; the closest well Tamar knew how to get to was on the Helladia side of the hills. We’d be easy to track, on horses, though if Myron were doing the tracking he would utterly disregard the possibility that the slave could be escaping on horseback. “What did you tell the other slaves?” I asked Nika.

  “Nothing. Well, I told them that Melaina had hit her head and needed to be close to me tonight, that’s how I brought her with me to the kitchen. I made her a little bed with the cloaks, that’s how I made sure we had them. And I made sure to forget something so someone would have to go to the pantry.”

  “Twice,” I said, thinking of the soldiers’ untimely arrival.

  “I forgot a couple of things, just in case.”

  “Why didn’t you ever climb out that window before?” Tamar asked.

  “I knew I’d never get away with a child. And the punishment for running away is severe. I couldn’t risk Melaina’s safety that way, not with so little chance of success.”

  Last spring I’d crossed these hills in a wagon, posing as a new slave of Sophos. There was a road that went over the hills, and I briefly considered taking it. We had a substantial head start and no one, even brighter sparks than Myron, would expect that a runaway slave would be on horseback. But my instincts balked at traveling so openly. Besides, the road was cut into the hills with a gentle slope, to allow horses to pull a wagon. Without a wagon, we could simply head straight over for most of the way. Even leading our horses over the steepest spots, it would still be faster. Besides, the road led to Helladia, and I wanted to give Tamar’s old home a wide berth.

  We reached Tamar’s
well at dusk; like the other Alashi wells I’d seen, it was marked with a cairn of rocks. We took turns hauling up water for our horses, then for ourselves. The night was cold, and we slept huddled together. Even knowing that Tamar was on watch, I kept rousing, certain that someone was about to catch up with us. I wound up waking up everyone well before dawn so that we could start again as quickly as possible.

  “Even if they follow our trail, we’re far enough out that it would be too risky for them to come after us,” Tamar said. “They’re afraid of the bandits and afraid of the Alashi. It’s not worth it, not for two slaves.” She glanced at Nika and lowered her voice. “Think about it. How stubborn was your old master? How hard would he search?”

  Kyros was quite stubborn, but not reckless. “You’re right,” I said. “A slave who escaped on horseback would’ve gotten too far too fast to be worth the effort.”

  “Did he ever use the djinn to search?”

  “No. Bound djinni aren’t very good at finding people who are making any attempt to hide. If you just tell them to look, they only look in the open. If you tell them to look everywhere, they waste their time checking every mouse-sized crevice until you get fed up and call them back to you. No one’s ever come up with a way to get a djinn to search in a sensible way.”

  “But Kyros found you with his djinn . . .”

  “He had a pretty good idea of where to look. He had the djinn find the Alashi camp, and then wait until it saw me. Now the he doesn’t know where to look, it won’t be that easy.”

  “So what will he do?”

  I bit my lip. I hadn’t really wanted to think about this. “It’s a big world,” I said. “He’ll have to tell the djinn to look everywhere. It could take a really long time.”

  Tamar mulled that over for a few minutes, then asked, “Do you think he’ll send a djinn to search, though? Because it probably would find you eventually.”

  “When I was bringing Alibek back to Kyros, he told me that after his sister escaped, Kyros took Alibek for his harem instead, then sent a djinn up to the steppes to tell Alibek’s sister what he did. And that was just out of pique. He’ll never give up on finding me. Ever.”

  It was light enough to ride now, so we mounted and moved out. We stopped to rest a few hours later, and Tamar said, “Do you think we met Alibek’s sister? I mean, do you think maybe Ruan is Alibek’s sister? It would explain some things, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, but Ruan didn’t act like she recognized Alibek.” Also, she defended me when Alibek said I was a spy. “It was probably someone else, but who knows. You want to go back and ask?”

  “No.”

  A few more days of riding brought us close to where the Alashi would be having their fall gathering. We moved in close enough to see the smoke from some of their campfires and then stopped, helping Nika and Melaina down from the horses.

  “Be sure to tell them that you ran away once, and were caught and brought back against your will,” I said. “The Alashi don’t rescue slaves; they believe those who truly want freedom will run on their own.”

  “But I didn’t get away,” Nika said. “What if they don’t accept me?”

  “They will,” Tamar said. “Anyway, you can’t stay with us forever.”

  “They’ll call you a blossom and make you pass tests—oh, don’t worry. They’ll haze you but they’ll accept you. Good luck.”

  “Wait,” Nika said, and took my hand. “I thought I recognized you, that first night. But I was right to trust you. Whoever you used to be, today you are not the person I thought you were. When I reach the Alashi, who should I say helped me?”

  Saying my own name, my real name, felt like it would be a rejection of her forgiveness. But I wanted Janiya, at least, to know who’d done it. “Tell them it was two women, one named Tamar, the other named Xanthe.” Xanthe, the name of Janiya’s lost daughter. Janiya had told me once that I reminded her of Xanthe. She would know it was me.

  “Thank you,” Nika said again, took Melaina’s hand, and turned towards the smoke from the fires.

  I was standing in the center of Janiya’s camp: the yurts loomed up around me, but I knew they were empty, and I could hear none of the noises from the horses or camels or dogs that I would have usually heard.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  I turned, and saw Zhanna standing in front of one of the yurts.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” she asked again. “You sent us Nika.”

  “It was me,” I said, but a gust of wind whipped the words away and I was alone again. “Zhanna? Are you there?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement, but when I turned, it wasn’t Zhanna—it was a man riding towards me on a horse. Kyros. I wrenched myself awake with a start and stared up at the starry night sky, listening to Tamar’s breath beside me. Zhanna had told me that with practice, shamans could sometimes communicate with each other through dreams—was this a dream like that? Was she trying to talk to me? And if so, what was Kyros doing in my dream? He was no Shaman.

  Tamar whimpered in her sleep, but settled when I nudged her slightly. It was almost dawn; I watched as the eastern horizon lightened to gray.

  “We need some sort of disguise,” Tamar said, startling me. “Some way that we can move around through places like Elpisia without anyone getting suspicious.”

  “No disguise is going to get us into Sophos’s household unrecognized. You lived there for years, and even if I were alone I think someone would recognize me.”

  “Yeah.” Tamar sighed. “Maybe we should do one of the others first. You know, for practice. When we go to Sophos’s, I want to do it right. I want to get everyone out of there, even Boradai if she wants to go.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “But now . . .” She sighed. “Maybe we could pretend we were merchants?”

  I’d thought about that already. “Merchants have stuff to sell. We could tell them that we’d been merchants but had been raided by bandits and barely got away with our lives. But if we’re going to free all the people we want to free, we need to come up with some way to pay for food and shelter. Winter’s coming. We have no yurt. We’re running out of food.”

  “Have we got anything at all that we could sell?”

  “The horses.”

  “I don’t want to sell them.”

  “I don’t either.”

  I poked through my packs. They contained what I’d had with me when I’d been banished: some waterskins, some food, a blanket, a knife. My sword, the one I’d stolen from the bandits last spring. Flint and iron. Women in the sword-sisterhoods all carried basic survival materials with them in case they got separated from the group—lucky for me, or I’d have died the first day. Nothing valuable, though. Nothing I could sell. And no money.

  There was something lumpy at the bottom of one of my packs, though. I dug out the lumps and examined them in the dawn light. Karenite, two thumbnail-sized pieces of it; they rattled against each other in the palm of my hand. How did this get here? I remembered after a few minutes of thought. Janiya had given us a chunk, and then Tamar and I had found another piece when we failed the first test to join the Alashi. We’d found karenite, as instructed, but the real test had been whether we’d have the sense to provision ourselves before going out to look. Janiya had refused to take it when we returned, and in my embarrassment, I’d tossed both pieces into my pack and forgotten about them, until now.

  “Can we sell that?” Tamar asked.

  “Probably,” I said, looking it over. “I don’t honestly know how much we’ll get for it, though.”

  “Do the Greeks even, you know, like it? It’s pretty, but it’s not really a gemstone.”

  I laughed a little and tucked the karenite back into my pack. “That’s not what the Greeks use it for. Karenite is used as the binding-stone on a spell-chain; it’s needed, I think, as part of the spell.” I chewed on my lip. “I think the main reason the Greeks were planning an offensive against the Alashi is that most of the
Greek sources of karenite are tapped out.”

  “There’s a lot of it up on the steppe,” Tamar said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “But the Greeks don’t go up hunting for it because of the Alashi, and the Alashi don’t sell it to the Greeks. That’s why I’m not really sure what it’s worth.” I scratched an itch. “My mother lives upstairs from a gem-cutter, so I know what he’d spend to buy an uncut ruby or sapphire or onyx, and what he’d sell them for after cutting them. But he never touched karenite. I’d never seen it in raw form before coming up to the steppe.”

  “Could you try selling it to a gem-cutter?”

  “It’s the sorceresses who want it.”

  “Do you know where you can find a sorceress?”

  “Daphnia,” I said.

  “Are there slaves you need to free down in Daphnia?”

  “Yes. One man was sold to someone down there.”

  “Well, let’s go there next, then.”

  FREEDOM’S GATE

  A Bantam Spectra Book / July 2004

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

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  Copyright © 2004 by Naomi Kritzer

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