Racing the Dark
Page 18
Several of the supplicants looked as though they had not bathed in recent memory. She saw woman draped in ragged coats, despite the warm weather, smoothing her matted hair. Her fingers came away smeared with grease. A younger man, standing toward the back of the line, had the same kind of hollow-eyed, desperate expression, but his clothes-navy pantaloons with a white shirt and an embroidered, knee-length vest-looked respectably lived-in, as though he had not quite yet surrendered to the street. His light brown-red hair, though thinning, reminded her unexpectedly of Kohaku. She had not thought of her childhood crush in a long time, and the memories that had once been so painful now made her smile softly. The supplicant even looked like Kohaku, although his face had blurred in her memory and she could hardly trust it. It made her sad to think that this man who so resembled her first love would probably, along with all the others, be sacrificed to the fire spirit within a month. Just as her boat was finally ready to leave the harbor, the man turned around and briefly caught her eye. She thought she felt a moment of startled recognition-could that possibly be Kohaku?-before his eyes hardened and he looked away.
No, she thought, walking to the other side of the deck. Of course not.
Akua wasn't home. She had left a note for Lana on the table by the fireplace.
Lana,
I'm out making preparations for tonight, when I will show you the final stage of your new power. Bring the necklace. I've instructed Ino to take you to a special place in the center of the lake-don't be alarmed by anything you see there, I promise it won't hurt you.
Her name was a barely legible scrawl at the bottom of the paper. Akua's handwriting was generally indecipherable, with awkward characters squashed next to one another as they rambled across the page. Lana looked out the open door and saw Ino sitting serenely on a lotus leaf made of rippling water. He must have emerged from the lake while she was reading the letter. His liquid eyes looked somehow wary as she approached him, but she knew that there was no real way to read a water sprite's face. They simply weren't human enough.
"The witch wants me to take you to the center," he said, his voice sounding more alien than ever.
"I suppose we should go, then," she said.
Ino stared at her silently for such a long time that she began to feel uncomfortable. "Do you listen to everything she says?" he said finally. "Will you follow her blindly down the path of death? You are a diver-would you turn your back to the water?"
His words and his weird, alien anger made Lana's stomach knot. She looked at the air around him expectantly, but it remained stable. Why wasn't Akua's geas attacking him for his words? To her shame, part of her wanted it to.
"What choice do I have? The fish are gone! Akua's my teacher now. All this ... it maybe sacrifice, but it's not death." She paused. "I know she's keeping things from me, Ino, but it's just ... I have to, I want to learn."
"You know nothing, little diver. The witch is far more than you think-you should resist her."
Lana's body tensed with anger. "So says one who has been bound by her geas for decades! Why don't you resist her?"
His opaque eyes seemed to soften. "At least I know I'm bound, Lana."
It was the first time he had ever used her name. Why did that simple fact undo all her anger?
"Why doesn't the geas attack you for saying this, Ino?"
"The witch decides," he said.
Lana stared at him-could he possibly be implying that Akua wanted him to say these things to her?
"If you refuse to leave," he said, "I am bound to take you to the center. Do you insist?"
Though she knew the idea of leaving was ludicrous, the strangeness of Ino's behavior almost made her consider it. Was Akua planning something dangerous? Probably. Was that reason enough to make her leave? No. Whatever this was, it was too powerful to ignore. She'd wanted Akua to teach her more powerful geas for years-she could hardly run away now that she finally had the chance.
"You should take me, Ino," she said.
The water surrounding him began to dissolve back into the lake. He held out his hand and after a moment Lana put her own inside his pale, spindly fingers.
"Then let's dive," he said, and pulled her under the water.
They were under for a long time, but the water sprite kept a bubble of air around her mouth and nose so she could breathe. He led her to the deepest parts of the lake, but curiously she never felt any pressure on her ears. The world he showed her was ethereal and terrifying, a surreal waterscape where hideously laughing faces appeared in the most unlikely locations. Even the swaying algae seemed to have glinting fish eyes and mocking coral grins. This far below, Ino's pale skin was translucent, but instead of veins she thought she saw tiny creatures, like minnows or baby fish, squirming beneath his skin. He must have sensed her sudden tension, because he turned around and smiled briefly, a sardonic grimace that made her feel even more disquieted. Still looking at her, he blew offhandedly into her face, releasing a stream of hundreds of tiny, dazzlingly bright red and gold fish. They swirled around her face and her hair for a moment before gathering together and swimming away. Lana stared at Ino, desperately trying to control her breathing and facial expression. She didn't know why he was trying to scare her, but she was determined not to let him. Seeing her frown, the smile left his face and he nodded briefly before leading her onward.
The things she saw after that were mildly unsettling, but she got the impression that the creatures of the lake were no longer putting on some kind of show for her. Perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later, he began angling upwards and Lana once again entered the more familiar parts of the lake. They emerged in an area with crystal clear water, but oddly shielded from direct sunlight by a heavy mist. In fact, even though they were mere feet away from the tiny island, she couldn't pick it out of the fog until Ino led her to a set of steps.
She called up fragments of memory from that other time she had been here. The steps emerged from the lake itself onto the island, where an old-style temple took up most of the land. The wooden door, decorated with a key carved in bas-relief, was closed. Ino walked halfway up the steps, a film of water clinging to his pale skin.
Lana looked at him and then back at the door.
"Should I go in?" she finally asked.
"It's what she wants," he said. He settled quietly on the steps, but Lana got the impression that he was nervous being so near the temple.
"It looks like a death temple ..." Lana said slowly, half to herself. "There aren't so many of those, these days."
Ino spat into the water and a fish darted away. "Perhaps you aren't so ignorant, after all."
Lana looked at the water sprite and smiled. "You know, Ino-I get it. You think this is a bad idea. I might even agree with you, but I don't see many other options and ..." she shrugged, "I guess I'm curious."
Lana walked the rest of the way up the stairs and put her hand on the door, stopping just short of pushing it. "Will you wait for me?" she asked, not looking at him.
"You have my word, little diver," he said, and it was the closest thing to affection she had ever heard in that alien voice.
The temple was a simple open room, with a smooth stone floor and a few books resting on shelves inlaid on the back wall. In the center of the temple Lana saw something she could only describe as a column of air-although it was not technically a column, and it was filled with a substance Lana was fairly sure wasn't exactly air. It seemed to bore straight through the ceiling and floor with its insubstantial milky-gray mist. Within it Lana thought she could see strange shapes darting in and out of visibility-a man's face replaced by a horse's head, and then an old-style ship foundering in a storm and smashing against some rocks, the expressions of fear and agony on the faces of the passengers as they realized they were going to die-
Lana abruptly wrenched her eyes away from the column, feeling nauseated. What kind of a place was this? But she had seen that column before. Once, many years ago ... She shuddered and sat abruptly on the floor, wrestli
ng with sudden memories of a night that she had forgotten for the past four years.
Sick and rendered nearly insensible by the drugs that Akua had given her, Lana had been dragged to this temple on her first night in Akua's home. Akua stood in front of the column for a long time, holding a strange off-white-colored flute and occasionally reciting a few words in an incomprehensible language. The drugs distorted everything, but eventually Lana saw the witch put the flute to her lips and blow three brief notes. Lana grew aware of the sudden change in the air-the feeling of anticipatory power. Then, Akua had pushed Lana inside the column.
She had been terrified, but too befuddled to do anything. She felt as though she were falling through time instead of space. As she fell, she was overwhelmed with brief, confusing glimpses of a thousand people's deaths. Some were peaceful, surrounded by family, but most were sudden and painful. The sensation that she had entered the very essence of death terrified her. She saw a man dying in a horrible fire, and then a huge stone, nearly as tall as she was, with a shard of bone impossibly embedded in its middle. Whatever entity lived inside this column made her tremble with its desire; no matter what the cost, it told her, it would have that shard of bone destroyed. Just before she thought she would pass out with fear, the column of air spat her out, leaving her to huddle on the mercifully cold floor and realize that she had wet her pants.
"She will do," she had heard a voice say, and then everything faded.
Lana rocked back and forth on the floor for a long time after the memories returned, overcome with nausea as though she had just experienced it. After a while, she uncurled herself and put her hands flat on the floor. She crawled toward the back of the temple, careful to avoid glancing at the column even when she fingered the strange inscriptions carved into the blocks of stone immediately surrounding it. She stood up when she reached the few books, uncomfortably conscious of the presence at her back. She felt almost as though it was watching her.
The books here looked far older than the ones Akua kept in the cottage. Lana forgot her fear as she ran her finger curiously over their spines, picking up a thick layer of dust that she wiped absentmindedly on her pants. On a whim, she picked up a smaller volume, bound in ancient, cracking leather and filled with yellowed pages that seemed likely to crumble at any moment.
Lana sat down with her back to the wall and opened the book. On the first page she saw the older character for "observation" handwritten in inartistic but sure strokes. Something about the handwriting struck her as familiar, but she didn't quite know why. All of the characters in the book were of a far older dialect, as was the grammar, and she sometimes had to skip over whole paragraphs as incomprehensible. It read like a strange series of disjointed anecdotes and tidbits of information-an account of the choking ash rain from a minor eruption paralyzing Essel was followed by a strange geas the author had learned to let her see temporarily at night. When Lana noticed a casual reference to Yaela's recent sacrifice and binding of the water spirit, she realized with a shock how old this book must be. What she held in her hands was an account of the world before the spirit bindings-if Nui'ahi was still erupting and plagues were ravaging the cities, that meant the fire and death spirits were still unbound. A few years after this author had scribbled these observations in this book, a whole new era of civilization had begun. The thought made her feel breathless-what an incredible time in which to live! How had Akua come across such a book? She remembered Kohaku discussing the few texts that still survived from that period, and she could only imagine how much a personal account like this would be worth to the Kulanui.
After flipping through a few more pages, she noticed meticulous drawings of the outer islands, including one that wasn't often drawn on maps anymore-the wind shrine. Beneath the drawing the author had written a brief note: "Wind shrine island is too big, too far away. With no inner shrine, how long can Dahi expect to contain the spirit?"
But far more disturbing to Lana was an entry toward the back of the book.
"From an ancient witch-woman whose death I observed last night, I have learned an awesome secret, one that frightens and excites me. I realize, now, that though I have spent years searching for answers, I have been floundering in the dark until this woman revealed the secret to me. Soon, I think, I will truly understand death. She taught me a geas, one I am half-afraid to write here, despite my protections."
The next few sentences were all but unintelligible to Lana:
"... sacrifice, she warned, but the principle theorems behind this geas must be applicable to oneself as well as others. I must think on it further. For now, it will suffice to write the geas as she told me (in the traditional verse-form):
The reciter of this geas will be hounded by the circumstantial death of the person they are trying to save. But the wording, I notice, is tricky-the reciter must be hounded to an inevitable death, which I assume means either exhaustion or old age, and not being physically slain by the death itself. The wording makes me suspect that if that should happen, both the reciter and the original person would die."
There were a few more entries written after this one, but Lana had read enough. She put down the book and made the mistake of looking up. In the column of air she saw a white mask with parallel red stripes on the cheeks that looked like a gigantic version of the ones worn by performers during the demon holiday. Its eyeholes were filled with fire and the smiling cutout mouth somehow seemed to be laughing. Lana scrambled up from her place on the floor and ran out the door, slamming it shut behind her.
Ino was still sitting on the steps. He glanced up at her, looking inexpressibly sad.
"You didn't like what you saw?" he asked.
Lana's legs felt like jelly and she sat down next to him. "I don't really know what I saw," she said, "but no, I didn't like it."
She and Ino sat in silence as they waited for the witch-woman to come.
At some unseen signal, Ino left her so he could lead Akua to the temple. She came in the boat, which floated much lower in the water than usual because of her heavy cargo. Evening had fallen. Lana had a hard time seeing Akua's expression through the mist, but she thought that her teacher looked almost resigned.
"So, you came," Akua said when she stepped out of the boat and onto the steps.
"Thought you could scare me off? You said something about the necklace."
Akua nodded. "Well then. Bring that inside," she said, gesturing to a brown sack in the back of the boat. She went inside the temple as Lana staggered under the bag's weight and struggled to haul it up the stairs.
When she entered the temple and deposited the bag on the floor, she saw Akua picking up the book Lana had dropped in her haste to leave earlier. Akua stared at her appraisingly and then, without saying a word, put the book back on the shelf.
"Upend the bag," Akua said, as the door shut behind them. Lana complied and watched, amazed, as hundreds upon hundreds of linked charms spilled out. Most were made of bone, like the one around Akua's neck now, but some were carved from pieces of wood and she thought she even spotted a pair of white mandagah jewels. Each charm had its match, and she wondered why Akua would go through the trouble of making bonded charms without giving one of the pair to a willing sacrifice.
"These charms represent an immeasurable amount of power. I'm getting older, I live a relatively quiet life. I have no real need for them anymore. But your time with me is ending, Lana-I've taught you nearly all I can and I want to give you something that will help you when you're on your own."
Akua looked completely sincere as she said this, and Lana relaxed. Ino had worried her over nothing. But she was surprised at the mixture of anger and loss she felt at the thought of leaving Akua. There was so much more she had yet to learn, she was sure of it, but she supposed that Akua had never promised to turn her into a master of the spirits. She knew more than enough to support herself as a healer, now.
"But how can I use so many of these?" she asked, staring at the enormous pile in front of them.
Something about Akua's suggestion made her nervous. Some of those necklaces looked ancient, like they had stories they were desperate to tell-stories that she didn't really want to know. But Akua looked expectant, and Lana couldn't think of a reasonable way to refuse her. After all, wasn't this what she had always wanted since becoming Akua's apprentice? A chance at real power?
Finally, Lana nodded. "What do we have to do?"
At Akua's instruction, she pushed the necklaces across the floor until they were right in front of the column of air. Though Lana tried not to look, the guilty glances she stole made her think that the strange presence inside the column was more agitated than it had been before. The air was swirling maniacally, with images appearing and morphing and disappearing too quickly for Lana to even recognize them. She tried to suppress her sudden trepidation-she wished that she were outside with Ino instead of in here, performing a task she didn't understand.