The Burning City (Spirit Binders)

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  He felt as though he’d been punched in the gut. He sank less than gracefully into his seat and took a long pull of his bitter, lukewarm tea.

  “You should have sent for me.”

  “She wouldn’t have let you in. You know that.”

  He supposed he did. “But there was no reason not to tell me after. Not unless you suspected something.” He paused. “Something much worse than a leak.”

  Makaho placed her hands primly in her lap, but he knew he had finally hit upon something that disturbed her. “I have no evidence it was anything other than a natural illness. She’s quite recovered. Children sicken all the time.”

  “But you suspect, don’t you?”

  “I have no evidence.”

  “Oh, since when do you need evidence, Makaho? I thought you could smell deception.”

  “You give me too much credit.”

  Kohaku leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I think I give you just enough. You know precisely how much you’re worth to me if you can’t guarantee the safety of my wife and daughter. Do we understand each other?”

  Makaho’s eyes were furious, but her voice was calm enough. “As always. I will protect them with my life.”

  “And you will tell me when you discover who is responsible?”

  Makaho stood with a little less grace than normal and walked to the entrance. “Of course. I have business to attend to. You will hear from me when I have the ones you want.”

  He let her go and waited until he was quite sure he was alone before putting his head in his hand and letting out a long moan.

  “Don’t be so sad, brother.”

  Kohaku’s teacup smashed against the wall.

  11

  KAI SUGGESTED THAT LANA TRY A SCRYING on Makaho, but she encountered fragments of trivial conversations and vertiginous maelstroms through which no sane mind could pass. In other words, the predictable confusion generated by someone who knew how to manipulate spirits. She pulled back. It was naive to expect the head nun of the fire temple to be vulnerable to such a simple attack. So she took out the old postulate book and flipped through the pages for fire that she hadn’t yet memorized. The dry list of postulates, “fire sucks life from air,” “fire blows a killing wind,” “the hottest flame is the one you can’t see,” made her eyes glaze over and her jaw crack before she was even halfway through. It was one thing to read through the death postulates; her sense of self-preservation, at least, kept her engaged. But fire, of the three bound spirits, had always seemed the least relevant to her life. She brushed some of the ash off of the pages and watched it sink onto the bed covers. Until now, she reflected, and applied herself with renewed focus. After an hour, however, she still hadn’t found anything that seemed like a sound base for a geas to use on Makaho.

  Her gaze caught on the black book, sandwiched between the bed and Kai’s small stack of belongings. She almost picked it up to start reading again, but she resisted the temptation. She didn’t believe Kai’s theory that Ino had deliberately given her the black book to distract her. But still, it didn’t hurt to have a reminder that she had more pressing goals. She spread her wings and lay down in a jumble of feathers on her pallet. The postulate book was a heavy, almost reassuring pressure on her chest. If she wanted to get around Makaho’s defenses, she needed to be clever. What would Aoi do in this situation?

  “Probably just find the nearest fire spirit and make it talk,” she muttered. And then, “Damn.” If her friendship with Ino had taught her anything, it should have reminded her that spirits are independent, intelligent agents with their own desires. She had joked to Akua once that Ino let her scry without a sacrifice because she’d given him her friendship. She would probably never befriend a fire spirit, but that was no reason why she couldn’t compel one to tell her what it knew.

  Excited, she flexed her wings and plucked out a small feather.

  “A small flame may be devoured by a larger one, but it may also last much longer,” she said. “I bind a spurt of flame. One that has watched the conflagrations of its masters.”

  She felt the power in the room, the anticipatory silence. But she realized that she had no extra way of seeing whatever spirit she had summoned.

  “I bind you to speak to me,” she added.

  “The great fire isn’t my master,” said a disembodied voice from somewhere near her sandal. If she squinted, she thought she could just barely make out a distorted flicker by the floor, a heat shimmer and a lick from an angry flame.

  “But the great fires can devour you,” Lana said.

  “So you call the shark your master?”

  “Point taken.”

  “This is a strange binding, black angel.”

  “I want you to tell me all you know of Makaho,” she said.

  “We don’t pay much heed to human politics.”

  Lana had to roll her eyes. “Only enough to manipulate a human into weakening your binding.”

  “That’s the great fire. I’m just a lowly flame.”

  “You must at least know of the geas she uses. How does she bind you?”

  “She binds us to serve her purposes.”

  Lana had a distinct urge to kick the flame. “What purposes?”

  “We help the Ana. We lift bindings from one to put them on another. We see the Mo’i. We offer help to those who would release the foul binding.”

  Lana felt her breath stick in her throat. Release the foul binding? She knew where she’d heard language like that before. When she’d made the sacrifice to the wild wind that had made her a black angel, she’d requested aid from the lost wind tribes. And one of their number, a boy named Yechtak, had led her to the ruins and told her of his life without binding. His people called hers “binders” and thought what they had done was evil, much like the napulo did. And if she understood what the sprite was saying. . .

  “Makaho is a napulo? She’s against the spirit bindings?”

  “I know nothing of your human allegiances.”

  Lana rather doubted this, but she let it go. This explained a great deal, after all. Her alliance with Kohaku. And this mysterious Ana—Lana wondered if, finally, she’d begun to glimpse the shape of Akua’s inscrutable game. Could Akua want to release the great death spirit?

  “And the Ana you help. Does she have one arm?”

  She felt a warmth on her foot and the flame made a sound like fire crackling through kindling. Laughter? “She has spoken of you, as well.”

  “Where is she? Does she have another woman with her?”

  “I cannot say. She does not bind us.”

  “No,” Lana said slowly. “No, she wouldn’t. Akua has always been death’s creature, hasn’t she?”

  The sprite didn’t answer her directly but said, “Death has its own plans, black angel. And Makaho lays her traps.”

  She squatted down on impulse. For a flickering moment, her vision of the true world dimmed and she had an impression of a tiny bird, like a starling, with wings of red flame. Then the fragile binding snapped and she was alone.

  “What traps?” she said softly, to the empty room. So many schemes, and such a shadowed path through them.

  Makaho schemed to break the fire spirit’s binding. And if she was helping Akua—the most powerful Ana in the islands, after all, and one who had a disturbing affinity with death—then that must mean that the death spirit wasn’t far behind. Hadn’t Kai himself told her of his fears about the death spirit’s instability? They had all thought that, in the end, it was fire that had succeeded in partially breaking free. But what if it were both? What if the eruption of Nui’ahi were both a goal and a feint, a way for one spirit to distract from the other’s plots?

  What if the death spirit were about to break free, and Akua had pledged herself to the task? She had bound Lana to something on that long-ago day in the small death shrine on her lake. She had made Lana a party to some aspect of her pact with the death. And then Lana had entered into another agreement of her own free will in order to save
her mother’s life. If Akua was manipulating everyone to help free the death spirit, then she was using Lana and her mother as her primary tools.

  Shaking and furious, Lana sprinted down the stairs and out through the doors, ignoring the startled craftsmen busy in the main room. The air outside was empty of any specters.

  “Death!” Lana yelled, her voice cracking. A few walking past gave her a sharp look and then hurried on. She scared them. She didn’t care.

  “Avatar!” she yelled again. “Show yourself!”

  It appeared like a blink before her, serene and mildly curious. “Yes, Lana?” it said.

  She could not get much closer without walking through it, but she leaned in so it could get the cleanest impression of her fury.

  “I won’t let her free you,” she said, her voice shaking. “I’ll keep you bound, I swear it.”

  Just the thought of the destruction that would follow in the wake of its release made her dizzy. Would anyone survive it?

  “And your mother? Will you kill her for the sake of an unnatural binding?”

  Lana opened her mouth and then closed it. To her shame, she couldn’t answer, so she looked away—anywhere but that horribly familiar, placid mask—and saw something astonishing:

  Large white flakes, like bleached chunks of ash or coconut shavings, falling from the cloudy, white-glow sky. She put out her hand. The chunks melted like ice on her skin and settled in the folds of her shirt. They caressed the edge of the death’s robe, as though wondering whether to acknowledge its existence, before resting on the ground beneath it.

  All around her, rebel soldiers and runners and ordinary people were stopping to stare. One young girl tilted her head back and opened her mouth wide. Lana licked her hand, where several of the flakes had melted. Water. Pure water.

  Sky ice? “What is this?” she said to no one in particular.

  “Snow,” said a frustratingly familiar voice. Eliki had returned while she had been arguing with the death. Lana thought she would act dismissive of the wonder falling out of the sky, but she looked around with as much surprise as the rest of them. A smile surprisingly devoid of irony or derision tugged at the corners of her mouth.

  “I saw snow once,” she said. “When my daughter was born. It wasn’t as much as this, but I saw the ice fall out of the sky.”

  “In Essel?” Lana asked, despite herself.

  “No,” Eliki said, her pale eyes still warm and distant with memory, “A small fishing community, but not much nearer the inner islands than here. They saw snow every few years, but we left soon after.”

  Lana looked at Eliki and tried to imagine it: a young mother, because Eliki for all her strangeness and ferocity could not be very old, living on a backwater island probably much like Lana’s own. Her daughter would die far too young, but Eliki wouldn’t have known that. Could she fish? Had she even dived beneath those frigid waves to bring up seaweed and clams and other treasures far more mundane than the mandagah jewels of Lana’s youth?

  Eliki caught Lana’s stare and laughed softly. She brushed Lana’s shoulder, releasing a powdery spray that blew away in the wind. “You look at me and what do you see? A spirit? A monster? We’re all human, black angel.”

  And what did that mean? Humans bound—each other, spirits, it didn’t matter, so long as something could be bent and manipulated. Lana did it as much as anyone else. She tried to imagine the life of the mandagah, solitary and unencumbered by all but the most basic needs. Impossible. She would have to cease to breathe before she ceased to bind.

  “And isn’t that the horror?” Lana said softly. Eliki raised her eyebrows, but before she could say anything a soldier ran forward, slipping on the ice-slick ground and breathing harshly. He shouted Eliki’s name once and then fell to his knees.

  An arrow, fletched with partridge feathers, protruded from his back. Lana blinked. People were shouting—pounding footsteps through the now-cursed snow, a distant scream. And the snow, falling like a thick, implacable blanket from the sky, muffled sound and isolated the horror that was all too clear before her. Eliki knelt, holding the gasping soldier up long enough for him to speak his news. His words were perfectly intelligible, and yet Lana found herself straining for their meaning: barricades breached and fires in the streets. Fighting, that she understood, and death. She turned to where the death still stood.

  “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she whispered.

  “Reaping my bleak harvest? Not just yet.”

  No, she thought frantically, perhaps not. Perhaps Akua wouldn’t even have to go through the trouble of freeing the death spirit. Perhaps this war would destabilize the millennia-old bonds perfectly well on its own.

  “Lana!”

  Eliki’s voice, sharp and urgent, dragged Lana back to the moment. She stared at the tableau of the too-pale rebel leader gripping the sagging body of a wounded soldier and thought, it has come. Nothing I can do will stop this.

  Her legs were stiff with cold, but they ran quickly enough. “What should I do?” she asked.

  Eliki was gracious enough not to do more than nod. “They’ve attacked Sea Street. Bloody One-hand must have gotten wind of our plans. He’s trying to hem us in here before we can even think of pressing north.”

  But Lana didn’t see resignation in Eliki’s fierce smile. “But you’re still going to try for the harbor?”

  “He doesn’t know we have bows. Pano can keep him tied up for days at Sea Street while our archers pick them off. Even Bloody One-hand doesn’t have enough soldiers to besiege all of our borders. This might well work to our advantage after all. Take this one to the infirmary. And if you’ve overcome your squeamishness? Find Pano. I think he can use those wings to our advantage, black angel.”

  Lana nodded briefly and hauled the befuddled soldier to his feet as gently as possible, while Eliki sprinted away through a swirl of snow that swallowed her quickly.

  “Can you walk a little?” Lana asked the soldier. He grunted and coughed a spray of blood, but he moved forward.

  “Do you like the snow, Lana?” the death said, when she had finally gotten help for the now-insensate soldier.

  Lana looked down at her hands, covered in icy water and blood. “It makes the world look clean.”

  The death seemed to consider this. “I won’t take him,” it said, and Lana knew it meant the soldier, so gravely wounded. “Not just yet.”

  It seemed to vanish in the snow, in the white swirl of the wind, and Lana realized her teeth were chattering hard enough to make her jaw ache. Her socks had long since soaked through with melting ice. She wondered if she should find a pair of covered shoes to borrow, but she didn’t even know who owned a pair. Perhaps she could ask Kai to use a geas to dry her, but she doubted she could find him in this confusion. And in any case, he would need all of his strength for the war. She felt a momentary stirring of panic for him, and then quashed it. If anyone could keep safe in this mess, it would be Kai.

  It was unfair to have to fight a war in this snow, this quiet miracle. But she would fight it. Just as everyone else here would. All of her other choices were so much worse. She ran to Sea Street for warmth and as a distraction from her terror. Hundreds of people hurried past the fortified barrier, heading north to Eliki and the sixth district border. A lone two dozen stayed behind here, huddled behind the barricades cobbled out of dismantled houses and fresh bamboo, aiming and shooting through narrow slits.

  Those who saw her coming through the blinding snow gasped or cursed and stepped aside. It wouldn’t be a very good omen to see a black angel during a war. She must look to them like a specter of death. No matter that she could tell them in precise detail how wrong their image of death must be.

  She found Pano easily enough. He was behind the tallest barricades, shooting with seven other archers at the heart of the Mo’i’s force.

  “Pick off the ones who get too close, but don’t waste arrows!” Pano shouted, before readying his own bow for another shot.

  “It�
��s a mess!” one of the archers, an older woman, yelled back. “Can’t hardly make out anyone.”

  “Just make sure they’re not ours and shoot,” Pano said, with the air of a man who is thoroughly acquainted with an intractable problem.

  She grumbled, but let loose another arrow that must have hit its mark, judging by her sudden, feral grin.

  A nearby man let off a shot and cursed volubly as the bow cracked in his hand. Pano silently handed the man his own weapon.

  “I’m sorry,” the man stammered, “I didn’t think I pulled back too hard—”

  Pano just shook his head. “Just keep shooting and be more careful. If we fail here, everything is lost.”

  He finally saw Lana, standing in dumb silence before him.

  “Black angel?” he said, a mild, weary query. “Are you looking for Kai?”

  Lana shook her head and swallowed. “Eliki told me to find you.”

  “Is she—”

  “No,” Lana said quickly, to relieve Pano’s panic. “No, she’s fine. But she said you could find a use for my wings.”

  “Ah,” Pano said. His smile was so pleased and reassuring Lana found it impossible to regret her decision. If there had to be war, she was glad to be on his side.

  He directed her to fly over all the borders of the rebel territory, to see if the Mo’i had redirected any troops for stealth attacks and to relay any messages from the skeleton forces. And then, she was to fly to Eliki herself and relay any messages back to Pano.

  It was exhilarating, even given the wet wind and lingering ache in her left wing. Her heavy wing strokes flicked off most of the moisture, and she became grateful for the obscuring snow, because it protected her from arrows. On the other hand, that also made her own visibility frustratingly poor, and she had to land at a central point on each of the borders just to see anything useful. The respites served a good purpose—her flying muscles weren’t nearly as strong as they could be, and the air was so cold up high that she wondered if she would ever feel her toes and fingers again. The soldiers gave her blankets and access to their carefully tended fires until she was thawed enough to fly off again. Both the southern and northwestern borders were surprisingly quiet, given that a war was being fought in the northeast. Lana meant to ask Eliki for replacements of two of the archers’ bows, which had cracked in half.