Racing the Dark

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Lana grabbed a handful of rocks and hurled them at the death. They sailed through its body and landed on the ruins below. She longed to scream at it, but instead she bit on her already bloody lip and closed her eyes. She was stronger than all this-they would see how strong she could be. Her strength would be equal to what she had lost. The light from the half moon shone harshly tonight, illuminating nearly the entire mesa. She heard the rough scratching of something scrambling over the rocks to her left, but she ignored it, assuming that it was one of the small rodents that lived in the ruins. When she heard a gasp, however, she turned her head.

  It was Yechtak. He had climbed to the top of one of the mounds of rocks near the burro. His eyes were wide, but he had clamped his hands over his mouth as though he did not dare speak. Perhaps he knew she was bound to silence. The wind briefly swirled around him and then faded away again. They stared at each other for a long moment before something like resolution settled on his face.

  In the last few hours before dawn, Yechtak sang the wind in his rough untrained voice, giving her a measure of peace through the beauty of his own sorrow.

  The first light of dawn hit the mesa, turning the sky a clean pink instead of the blood red sunrise she remembered from all those years ago, when she had completed an entirely different sort of ordeal. The pain in her back subsided to a dull throbbing-the wings had finished growing. She had given the sacrifice of the wind. For all the good it had done her.

  Her joints screaming in protest, she forced herself to stand up. The new muscles in her back seemed to know how to fold the wings so their tips merely brushed the ground. The stones around her were littered with night-black feathers. Wind ruffled her hair gently, and the spirit gradually emerged before her in its semicorporeal form.

  "You have succeeded, pilgrim. You have become my black angel." Its voice was gentle, almost respectful. "I can no longer protect you here. You must go."

  Lana wondered if the itching in her throat was a scream or a swear. She had wanted help, but not this. It was too much sacrifice, too much pain.

  "These wings ... are a curse." Her voice was rough, barely audible.

  The wind didn't deny it. "A necessary one. They will keep you alive that much longer."

  Lana nodded slowly and picked up her bag, containing only a blanket, an empty water skin, and her now-useless leibo. As she straightened, she heard Yechtak's warning shout and was then suddenly overcome with the death's invasive presence. This was worse than the time in the forest-she was much weaker, and it was far more determined. She started to slip away and then, just as abruptly, found herself kneeling on the floor of the altar, panting and alive. Wind screeched and pounded in her ears.

  "You must fly, Lana. Take my gift and leave!" Desperation was palpable in its voice, and when she turned around, she understood why: it was fighting the death spirit. She had no time left.

  Stretching out her wings experimentally, she let off a wild, defiant yell and threw herself from the top of the promontory. At first she fell, but then a gust of wind buoyed her up and she pumped her wings-tentatively at first, and then desperately. And then she was rising, floating up and manipulating gusts of wind with an instinct she barely understood. She turned around and saw Yechtak, singing as he scrambled higher on the rocks, and she realized that the favorable winds were his doing.

  "Goodbye, Yechtak," she shouted. Moments later, both he and the mesa vanished out of sight.

  Yechtak waited for a long time on the rock pile, until the curious howling wind on the sacred altar had stopped and he sensed the wild spirit itself coming closer to him. He held his breath and waited as it formed itself out of the wind.

  "Do you realize what you just witnessed, my son?" asked the wind.

  Yechtak nodded. He could hardly believe it, but he knew. "I saw ... she became a black angel."

  "Yes. And you love her, even so?"

  He nodded again. "I will always."

  "Then I have a duty for you, a sacred task that only you can perform. Will you accept it? Will you do what none of your people have been asked for centuries?"

  He thought of Erlun's trust in him and how he had broken it so quickly. He would not break it this time. This time, he vowed, he would be strong enough. "I accept," he said. "What do you wish me to do?"

  "Leave this island, and tell the world what you have seen. Be the black angel's herald ... and perhaps the destruction to come won't give death so much strength."

  Then the wind left him and he was alone.

  At first only the stones themselves, the ancient red sentinels older even than the wild wind, witnessed the passage of the black angel. For her, they stirred themselves, and watched her ungainly first flight out of the ruins and over the plains. Poor girl, they thought, remembering the other, the one who flew like an eagle and not a just-born fledgling, the one who had returned and let her blood splash across the stones of the mesa so that the wild wind would be free. To the stones, it did not seem like so very long ago. They wondered how this one, too, would die.

  She passed out of sight of the mesa and the wondering rock, her wingstrokes stronger now, her command of the air more sure. The dveri were the first mortal creatures to see her, and at the sight the females huddled close to the river. A great black, wheeling hrevech, they thought her-for they did not know how else to view such massive wings that blotted even the sunlight. No vicious beak or chilling caw, but nothing about the majestic figure suggested anything human. They were slow to edge away from the lake, even after its shadow dwindled to a speck. They were small; its splendor was predatory and frightening. They had never seen anything quite like it before.

  Only a few children from Ofek's tribe noticed the angel, and they pointed at the sky in startled and excited shrieks that caused their dogs to bark and their caretaker to shush them. It was heading towards they ocean, they saw, a great black-winged god shot like a slingshot from the wild spirit's ruins.

  "Nana! Nana!" they shouted, squinting their eyes against the bright dawn sun and just barely making out a human figure beneath those impossibly large wings.

  With a sigh, Nana looked up from her beading and prepared to humor them.

  Her eyes were not what they had been, but she saw what had captured the children's attention readily enough. Her dveri bone beads fell with a series of tiny smacks into the mud below.

  She said a prayer, and then another. The creature she was all too afraid she recognized vanished over the ocean, with not even a feather to mark her passage.

  The sudden flash of light from inside the column was so bright that Manuku stumbled backwards and landed on the hard marble floors of the 'Ana's room. Unable to stop himself, he grabbed the mirror and looked to see what had happened.

  It was the girl again. He could tell that much even before the light cleared and he could see the image. Since that day four years ago when he had dared to look into the column with the 'Ana's mirror, he had seen her often. The death spirit seemed obsessed with her, especially during the past year. But this was easily the most agitated he had ever seen it. The image he saw in the column made him grip the handle of the mirror until the scalloped edges bit painfully into his skin.

  She had wings. Unspeakably massive black wings that the girl was using to fly over the ocean. He thought that it must be one of the spirit's lies, but the shock and the anger that seemed to vibrate off the image told him that it was true. But how? How could any human fly? There was blood on her face, he saw, and she was crying as she beat through the air, as if it hurt her to do so.

  The image suddenly changed. He saw the binding chamber, and he knew that this was the scene the death had shown him a hundred times over the last four years. He hated watching it and knew he should put down the mirror and leave, but the same curiosity that had stayed his hand so many times before kept him watching now as well. It was slightly different this time, he realized. The girl had never had wings before. Then he saw that she was holding him, and the expression on her face was so vicious
that he winced. He saw the glint of a blade and then she was stabbing it into him over and over again until blood covered the front of her shirt and he could no longer even see his own face.

  Manuku smashed the mirror.

  11

  Al STOOD UP TO HIS KNEES IN THE MUDDY CREEK that had once been the mighty Moka river. He let the water soak through his pants and the sediment settle over his feet, though he could have stayed perfectly dry if he chose. On the muddy banks to his left and right, stranded fish flopped and drowned beneath the harsh sun. Their desperate need to survive, the frantic pounding of their hearts as they slowly slipped towards death assailed his mind like a thousand tiny hammers. His head ached, but he refused to shut them out entirely. He was Kaleakai, the almostwater guardian, and even these dying river fish took some comfort in that. They hadn't made it to the tributary in time for spawning. There shouldn't have been a need to-the Moka dwindled to this degree rarely, and even then only in the high dry season. These fish had thought they had plenty of time to find a mate, to lay their eggs, to die in the cool waters upstream.

  And they should have.

  Aware of the futility, but unable to stop himself, Kai touched the waterbird feather in his hair and called a geas. Moments later, water coursed over his arms as though from nowhere, a torrential rush that washed all the flapping fish from the banks and into the muddy river. He forced himself to stop when all the frantic voices of their deaths had turned into sighs of contentment, the reassertion of purpose. Kai looked down at the river-it had risen barely an inch, and even that had exhausted him so he felt dizzy where he stood. Slowly, he climbed up the slippery bank and onto the tall brown grass at the river's edge. A few hundred yards across from the river, a series of rice paddies lay abandoned. The drought had dried up more than the river-back in the last village he had seen dozens of refugee farmers in line at the well. He had no idea where they would go now. He sighed and sat up, swatting at the flies that had found him in the absence of dying fish.

  He needed to make it to the country inn by nightfall, but he realized he wasn't looking forward to braving human company again. He had never understood quite how alien he appeared to most people until he had left on this journey. Pua had never treated him differently and his father was ... well, his father. He knew he had powers no human could touch, but those differences had never made him feel like some sort of chimera-until now.

  Of course, he thought, standing up and stretching, he wasn't very good at talking to people. Back at the village, the refugees had pointed to his hair and skin and whispered to each other in increasingly loud voices. Finally, one middle-aged man, his skin brown from the sun, had walked up to him.

  "Are you a guardian?" he asked, a little belligerently.

  Kai realized he didn't even know the answer. For two weeks he'd avoided the thought of going home and receiving his father's tears. Two weeks while his father waited in the antechamber of death.

  "Yes," he said, inadequately.

  The whispers from the crowd behind him grew into sounds of outright shock. The man looked angry. "Did you bring the drought with you? We all know it's the spirits. Something's happened."

  "It isn't me, or the water spirit," Kai said, although he supposed he couldn't be entirely sure of the latter. "I'm trying to discover the cause of your drought. Events like this are happening throughout the islands. I think you must be right, it must be the spirits."

  The man seemed a little surprised at Kai's honesty. "Well ... what spirits, then? We offered sacrifices," he gestured behind him. "You can see how well they worked."

  Kai hid his horror at the thought of what these farmers' backgarden sacrifices might have entailed-needless death, mangled geas, almost-useless bindings-and attempted to claim that he didn't know anything else.

  "There's only two left, though," the farmer said, cutting through his babble of words. "Only two it could be."

  Fire and death. The words had chased themselves through his thoughts ever since he had left the water shrine, and all throughout his long walk down the Moka river road. He hadn't even reached the inner temples, and already he had seen more than enough to convince him of his worst fears. The spirits weren't just trying to break free-one of them had already weakened its bonds. The knowledge was enough to terrify the hardiest guardian. Droughts along the Moka, far worse than any for centuries; brackish water and wholesale mandagah deaths in the islands around the death shrine; contagious fevers, of a virulence no doctor had ever encountered, engulfing whole trading villages in the Kalakoas; tide pools on some outer islands mysteriously glowing right before volcano eruptions ... something was happening, something unprecedented for at least half a millennium. Kai's father had refused to consider the possibility. If it had nothing to do with the water spirit, it was none of his concern. Sometimes it seemed that his father really didn't care if millions of people died, like when the wind spirit had broken free. And people thought of him as alienKai shook his head at the irony. They would quake in fear at the sight of his father's cold, fey, utterly inhuman countenance. Or they would have, before Ali'ikai had chosen death.

  Fire or death. He had drafted a letter to the new Mo'i of Essel, and he had high hopes that it might yield some results. After all, the Mo'i had just recently been selected by the fire spirit itself. He, more than anyone, might have a clue as to the strength of its bonds. Kai had also written a letter to the death guardian, but he didn't have much hope. By all accounts, Lono made Kai's father look like the soul of human charity. And yet so much of these occurrences suggested the last-bound spirit. But perhaps that was just his prejudice-of the four original bindings, only the death Binder had survived the process. The infamous 'Ana, who supposedly still lived in her tower on the inner island. No one knew how she had bound it; the depth of the mysteries surrounding that most famous of geas had fascinated scholars for centuries. Kai had always wondered how they could trust such a mysterious binding. And after what he had seen on this journey, he couldn't help his suspicions.

  He arrived at the inn just as the sun was setting behind the bamboo groves around the Moka River. He had expelled the water from his clothes, but the dirt clung to them, and he knew he hardly resembled a distinguished guest. The expression of disdain on the face of the proprietor who opened the door to the tall gates revealed this quite eloquently, but her expression changed when she saw his face.

  "Oh, your honor," she said, smiling widely, "we were expecting you.

  "Of course," Kai said, disliking her instantly. But the grounds of the inn were lovely, and no one here would be so boorish as to stare and whisper.

  "I trust you had a nice journey, sir?" she asked, without any obvious irony.

  Fire or death? "Lovely."

  He cast his mind up to a flock of cranes that had just emerged in a frantic tangle from the reeds by the river. Their calls echoed across the empty fields. He felt their panic and caught a hazy image of a great thing tearing across the sky. He pulled away and shook his head. Something big was coming. Something that reeked of death.

  But he supposed that he already knew that.

  There was an old saying that Nahoa had been hearing a lot recently: "The Mo'i's house is a place of hidden things." Now, nearly three months after she had married Kohaku, she knew it only painted half the picture. It wasn't just his house that kept things hidden, it was his heart, too. On the ship during their long ride home, everything had seemed like a dream. He had been so open and relaxed and gentle around her, and she had settled naturally into the role of caretaker. He had needed it at first-he had been incredibly weak and awkward in the days just after he lost his hand. But even after he began to heal, he seemed to expect the same level of devotion from her, demanding that she help him undress and pick out his clothes, even though the house had many servants. To be honest, though, she didn't mind-even though in public he acted like the soul of authority, she saw him in his most desperate moments of insecurity. She knew how much he needed her. Sometimes he would wake up late in
the middle of the night, sweating and shaking. Sometimes he seemed to be furiously arguing with someone, but of course there was no one else in the room. Mostly, he just begged her, "Has it happened yet?" Usually, she would soothe him and say "no," but one night she actually pressed him.

  "Has what happened yet? What are you talking about?"

  He looked at her, his eyes glazed over as if he were still halfdreaming. "The dying," he said quietly.

  She didn't ask him anything else after that.

  It scared her, how little she knew about him and yet how deeply she cared about him. He would vanish for days at a time, and when he returned would behave as though his absence had never happened. He ignored her questions about where he had been so completely that she eventually just gave up asking.

  He had been gone for two days now. Whenever he disappeared, the servants would avoid meeting her eyes and protest-far too loudly-that they new nothing of "His Honor." Sometimes, the pressure of being such a stranger in this sprawling labyrinth of a house made her want to open a window and scream. It would have been okay if she had Kohaku to share it with, but over the months he had only grown more distant. Three years ago, when she had left a house with too many children and too little space to become a sailor, she had thought she could never get enough of solitude. Now it wore at her bones until she cried, helpless and alone in the Mo'i's vast quarters.

  Still in her sleeping clothes even though it was well past noon, Nahoa paced in circles around the room, unmindful of the tears that fell in a slow drip from her eyes. Her nose began to run and she looked around for something to blow it with. The room was a mess, she realized with mild surprise. Rumpled bed linen was strewn across the floor. Two days' worth of uneaten food trays were stashed in every corner and dirty clothes covered most of the floor space. What in hell had she been doing for the past two days anyway? It was mostly a blur-she remembered calling for amant weed and a pipe the first night she realized Kohaku wasn't coming back home. She must have been wandering in a forgetful amant-induced haze ever since.