The Dead Rivers Trilogy by Naomi Kritzer
Requirements: .epub or .mobi Readers, ZIP 1.84MB
Overview: Kritzner’s Dead Rivers books are built upon interesting, solid world-building. In ancient times, Penelope, wife of Odysseus, while working endlessly at her weaving, discovers that work at her loom sends her into a deep meditational trance. There she learned the art of finding and capturing spirits from another place, the djinni, and binding them to her will to work magics. Those who belong to the Sisterhood of Weavers have learned the arts discovered by Penelope, and use them to imprison djinn as magical servants within spell-chains. The sorceresses’ arts, however, have a grim price, for each time they seek a new djinn they risk losing parts or all of their sanity. In the time of Alexander the Great, the young conqueror did not die young. Instead, his accomplishments were such that the Greek world believes that Alexander threw down Zeus from mighty Olympus and imprisoned him in a secret hell. Now the Greeks worship Alexander as the god, and Athena as the goddess, while somewhat Hellenized steppes tribes honor the immortal rebels Prometheus and Arachne. The novels, however, work as solid fantasy without their historical underpinnings being obtrusive.
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Freedom’s Gate
Set in a fantasy Earth in which magic reigns, enabled by the enslavement of the strange djinni by the Sisterhood of Weavers, twenty-year-old Lauria, a freeborn woman, is the favorite aide to Kyros, a powerful military officer. On his authority, Lauria is a messenger, observer, spy, and occasional slave-catcher. But now she is entrusted with a mission more dangerous than any that have come before. After years of relative peace, word has come to Kyros’s compound that the bandit tribe known as the Alashi is planning an offensive. It is up to Lauria to infiltrate the Alashi by posing as an escaped slave—a charge that requires she serve in the household of a neighboring officer. From there, she will stage an escape and continue on in her guise as a runaway. But posing as a slave—a virgin concubine, no less, a subservient role that chafes the proud young woman—may prove the least of her troubles. For even if she does escape and the Alashi do accept her, how can this freeborn woman convince them she is slave, not spy? Betrayed and raped by the Greeks she is supposedly serving, Lauria gradually finds herself questioning not her enemies, but her alleged allies, and ultimately her own false freedom.
Freedom’s Apprentice
Once the trusted aide to powerful military commander Kyros, freeborn Lauria hunted down his escaped slaves. But during a mission to infiltrate the bandit tribe known as the Alashi, Lauria’s loyalties shifted. When her identity was discovered, she was cast out by both sides. Now Lauria is determined to regain the trust of the Alashi, and, with the help of her formerly-enslaved blood-sister Tamar, seeks to free the slaves Lauria once returned to captivity and, hopefully, regain the Alashis’ trust. Along the way, the oath-sisters’ stealth missions to free the enslaved require the heroines to free the minds of these captives from enslavement before even attempting physical rescues, requiring a balancing act between trust and risk. But they cannot accomplish the daunting task alone. Desperate for a spell-chain to free a mine slave, Lauria turns to her enemies–-the Sisterhood of Weavers-–and apprentices herself to a sorceress. Lauria must decide whether she will turn to enslaving the magical djinni within spell-chains, even if it means the ability to free human slaves who owe their misery to her.
Freedom’s Sisters
Lauria, continuing her personal atonement by freeing slaves she once helped recapture, is betrayed by the final woman she attempts to win back to freedom. She finds herself captured by her father, the powerful military commander Kyros. Kyros in turn delivers Lauria to Penelopeia–stronghold of the Sisterhood of Weavers–for judgement. Not only is Lauria guilty of freeing slaves, she has also discovered that she has the power to free djinn, powerful spirits imprisoned in spell-chains by the Sisterhood through whom they work their magic. But there is more still that Lauria discovers about herself: she has within her the rare ability to be a Gate betwene the human world and that of the djinn, a resource that not only the Sisterhood wishes to exploit. Meanwhile, Lauria’s blood-sister Tamar, the former slave Alibek, and Janiya are searching for Lauria and attempting to convince a faction within the Sisterhood of Weavers, the Younger Sisters, to rise against the current leadership of the Sisterhood. Somehow, they must stop the army’s military assault from destroying the Alashi. Lauria eventually escapes from Penelopeia with the help of one of her guards, Xanthe, and the rogue sorceress Zivar, but learns that the djinni have been twisting her mind for their own purposes. Will Lauria free the river from the vast reservoir in which the Sisterhood has confined it, and if she does, will it save the Alashi, or destroy innocents?
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