—“ipa nui,” finished the one called Nahoa, and the death spirit gathered the little soul like fruit from a tree.
“I have to go,” Nahoa said, and the old witch let her leave. The little soul wanted to look at her own freshly dead body. The death let her. She was unhappy about something, but they were all unhappy, and it paid her little mind. Black angel, it heard her say, and then it drew the soul from within its robes and let it speak. The avatar is the death, but death is not its avatar. This spar of the godhead had inconvenient feelings.
“You have to tell the black angel,” the little soul was saying. “You have to tell her to remember Leipaluka. She’s a rebel soldier. She died.”
“So did you.”
Like most little souls, this seemed to sadden her. “No one knows who she is,” she offered.
“Maybe you will ask her,” it said.
“Can’t you tell me now,” she said, like so many before her. “What lies beyond the gate?” Like Lana herself had, back when this game was fresh.
It shook its head and flew high above the city, so the little soul would delight in the view and feel some pleasure before it fulfilled its duty and opened the gate. Before the game, it had never done this. If the godhead did not delight in death, it did not likewise regret its necessity. The little soul laughed and so he took her higher.
“This must be what the black angel feels like all the time!” she said.
And the avatar thought, no, but did not say so. It expanded its consciousness; it saw the world. The young woman who had been with the little soul’s body hurried through the streets now, her face covered by a cloak. In the homes still standing, people huddled around fires for warmth. Outside, it was much the same, though they held each other closer. It saw the dead everywhere, great souls and small souls, wise souls and wicked ones, all rising from the earth like mist. It harvested every one, and yet it was still alone with the little soul, flying high above the city. The avatar might be bound by petty emotion, but it is not even passingly human.
“Will you tell Papa I am sorry?” she said.
“Your father is dead,” it said, because it knows such things.
“No, not my father. The black angel’s father. Lana’s father. He works in the apothecary tent for the Mo’i.”
“Then I must already be there,” said the death, and then it was. The transition did not disorient the little spirit. It thought she must be very hardy.
A man with graying hair and callused, wiry hands tied a tourniquet. The death knew those hands like it knew its key. They had played a melody once, and if the death could be said to dream of anything, it dreamed of that lament played in the ashes of a oncegreat city.
“I know him,” was all it said.
“He plays music,” she told it.
“Yes.”
“I wish he would play for me,” she said, and it put her back inside its robe, because it could not think of any way to grant this request. It could not bear the little soul; death, who had borne the world.
As it always did when it felt this way, overwhelmed with the petty emotions with which she had taxed it, it found the girl. She had become a black angel, but she would always be the girl to it, the one who had bargained her life for her mother’s. The one the old woman had done everything to manipulate, yet still confounded her expectations.
She was near the battle but behind the main line. The dying souls flew at it like sea foam; it bifurcated itself to deal with them. She was arguing with the other woman, the one from the stables, who had also mentioned the name of that dead soldier.
“It wasn’t Pano!” the woman was saying. “I know it.”
But Lana looked as though the woman had punched her in the stomach. “What am I supposed to do? Call them both in and demand they tell me which of them ordered a little girl to murder a baby! How could Pano not have known?”
“Do you think Eliki tells him everything? You know they don’t always agree. Maybe she knew he wouldn’t like the plan and kept it from him.”
“But what plan, Nahoa? How does this make sense? Eliki isn’t cruel. She isn’t insane.”
“If you’re implying—”
“He ripped an eleven-year-old’s throat out!”
They were silent for a few seconds, breathing heavily as though they’d been running. “All right,” Nahoa said finally. “All right. He’s crazy. I know he is, believe me. But he ripped her throat out because of how much he cares about our daughter. Okay? Makaho wasn’t lying. She was terrified. Maybe. . .maybe Eliki knew that. Maybe she knew that if Makaho couldn’t protect me or Ahi, Kohaku would go nuts and cut off ties. Maybe she thought that if the fire temple and the Mo’i weren’t united, they’d be easier to defeat.”
“That does sound like Eliki. But there’s no way to be sure.” She shuddered. “I can’t accuse her unless I’m sure.”
“It wasn’t Pano,” the woman said stubbornly. “So it had to be Eliki.”
The two stared at each other, at a bleak impasse. The death, wearily, opened its robe and found again the little spirit.
“I don’t like it in there,” she said. “It’s dark and your key smells of blood.”
“Which of the rebels gave you the geas for the little baby?” it asked.
“Oh, the pale one,” she said.
“Did the other one know?”
“Nah, everyone knows he’s in love with the wife. He’d never hurt her. The pale one made me promise not to tell.”
“Pano didn’t know,” said the death spirit to Lana. She looked up, startled. It would have seemed to her that it just appeared.
“How do you know that?” she asked and then her face fell. “Oh. Oh. Poor Sabolu.”
“She wants you to play a song,” it said, though it knew that anything she played on the old woman’s flute would bind it. It did not mind so much, being bound in this way. It did not want to kill her. It had come to find its duty onerous, and so sought out ways to avoid it.
The other woman was round-eyed when Lana took the arm bone flute from her pocket and put it to her lips. She played that new melody, the one her father had written.
“I like this song,” said the little spirit. “I didn’t think so before, but she’s like her papa.”
The fighting up ahead had come to an abrupt stop. A thousand muffled thuds of weapons hitting the ground became a roar. The flood of souls slowed to a trickle. The death grew curious about this abrupt cessation of hostilities and so followed Lana and the pale one, Eliki, and another limping man forward through the rebel lines and the sandwiched remnants of the Mo’i army. They met the mysterious northern force almost precisely in the middle. The army commander was there, but he waited for one other who was a bit slower in coming. The death sensed him long before he saw his face. It could smell the wind spirit on him like desert air. It recalled the fight above the ruined temple on the mesa and wondered if enough of the wind spirit was present here to fight again. The boy had been younger then. He had witnessed the birth of the black angel, and the wind spirit had marked him as surely as it had marked Lana.
“Yechtak!” said Lana.
“I have come,” said the boy, now man. “I trust not too late?”
The death was reminded of the little soul by its side. Of the key that smelled of cold and blood and the gate past which no knowledge returns. “Come,” it said. “Let’s away. This world is not yours any longer.”
“Tell Lana about Leipaluka,” the little soul said, so it whispered the name in her ear.
“Who’s Leipaluka?” Lana said—
—as though she were speaking to someone else entirely. Yechtak remembered that Iolana often did that. But the pale one, the one with the hard, wary, fire eyes to her left, answered the question. “She decided to fight yesterday, but she made our meals sometimes.”
The black angel grimaced. “I think she’s dead,” she said. The pale one looked at her in horror. Yechtak thought it strange that of these three, only the hard one knew the name of the
woman who made their meals. Among the wind tribes, the privilege to bring the evening meal to the chief was a highly coveted honor. And no chief would ever dare not know and respect the one who performed this service for him. Binders, as he had often realized these past months, had no end to their strangeness.
“I come as the black angel’s ambassador,” he said, reciting the words he had learned by heart on the journey, “with a pledge of support and reinforcements from the people of Okika, who sympathize with the plight of the brutalized Esselans.”
“Okika?” she said. And then, more softly, “…and the Maaram army invades.” Yechtak didn’t know what to make of this, so he didn’t respond.
“We are at your service, black angel.”
The pale one spoke up. “I thank you for your help so far, ambassador, commander. But I should make it clear that I lead the rebels in all matters. Lana is an adviser.”
Yechtak blinked and struggled to keep his composure. He hadn’t planned for this contingency. How could the black angel herself not be the leader of her own army? “Do you agree to this?” he said, finally.
Iolana looked as though a bone had lodged in her throat. She glanced back at another young woman who seemed so tired and worn that she might faint into the snow. What had happened between those two? What were these strange, tense undercurrents? Behind Yechtak, his own army was growing restless. All the weeks he had envisioned this reunion, himself at the head of a victorious army swooping in to save the day, he had never thought it might end like this: tense and potentially self-destructing.
“Well?” the pale one snapped, but she was nervous as well.
“Lana?” said the other one, the quiet man on her left side. “What is it?”
“Sabolu is dead, Eliki,” Iolana said, her voice scraping. “One-hand ripped her throat out.”
“Not here, Lana,” said the pale one, with quiet urgency.
“And she is dead,” continued Iolana, “because you devised a crude geas and gave it to Sabolu so she could murder Nahoa’s infant daughter in the hopes of breaking up a political alliance.”
The quiet man seemed as sickened and shocked by this as the other two. He stared at the pale one, but he didn’t speak. She went very still. She denied nothing. Yechtak had to admire her grace.
“I’m glad it didn’t work,” she said. “I didn’t want to do it.”
“Spirits bound, Eliki,” said the quiet one.
Iolana looked Yechtak right in the eyes. His heart started to pound. “Arrest this woman, Yechtak. I am in charge of the rebel army.”
The black book
Nothing changed, because everything did. We lived for a time in a corner of a local farmer’s house spared by the earthquake while we rebuilt our own. Tulo and I found our joy in each other whenever we could—which wasn’t often, given the lack of privacy. Parech said nothing. Tulo and I hardly referred to the new dimension of our relationship. In truth, we didn’t need to. It seemed so natural, so right, that I only thought about it as something new when I noticed the occasional reserve in Parech’s demeanor. Sometimes I felt the distance between us like a block of ice. I knew that we had hurt him and I knew that he felt angry with himself for being hurt. Perhaps Tulo knew as well, but if so she said nothing. I watched Parech, like I always did. I wondered, like I always had. Only now, I had something of my own.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, Tulo’s fortune-telling act proved particularly lucrative. Everyone in Essel plunged into religious frenzy, sure they had done something to anger the gods or the spirits or their ancestors. She spent long hours past sunset touching people’s foreheads and pretending the spirits cared about their problems. Though her Essela was excellent, she affected tortured syllables and half-Kawadiri phrases to aid her reputation. After all, her primary appeal was her exotic appearance once she decked herself in pelts and feathers. In the meantime, I helped Parech salvage what materials we could from the collapsed house, and we began to build again. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing another house, and so in the evenings I redoubled my studies of the napulo philosophy and spirits and geas. I was determined to become an Ana so powerful I could keep everything I loved from destruction and decay. I had high ambitions. But I would start with a house.
After we spent the day driving the piles for our foundation deep into the ground (so deep, we hoped, that this time the earth would have to split apart to dislodge them), I forced Parech to stop and give me the metal knife he had purchased soon after we landed. The blade was almost supernaturally sharp, which was to my purpose.
“Ana,” he said, keeping a wary hand on the corded grip while I attempted to take it from him. Our fingers touched and lingered. “The spirits are so fond of your blood, are they?”
He smiled, he always smiled, but I felt like I had that night when he saw Tulo and me tangled beneath the blankets: punched in the gut and unable to breathe. Something in the clear quiet of his gaze. Something about the care he had always shown us, shown me, that I understood was extraordinary. And so I treated it as ordinary as the wind. “Would you rather spend all night on your knees?” I asked, my voice high and thready.
“Rather than watch you cut your arms like stripping barkcloth? I think we could all manage.”
I shook my head. “It’s no good, Parech. Those sacrifices aren’t nearly as strong as blood.”
“And what use does some wandering Kukichan farm girl have for that sort of strength?”
“You can’t bait me, Akane. I couldn’t bear to see this destroyed again.”
Parech let go of the blade abruptly. It fell onto the upturned earth. He turned away from me, toward the grassy dunes and the unseen ocean. The day had been unseasonably warm, but the sun was sinking now and the ocean wind was brisk. “I saw you before she did,” he said. “The first day we met.”
I was so astonished that I said, unthinking, “But she couldn’t see me.”
He smiled but still didn’t turn back. “Well. Obviously. She was the first thing you noticed, right? Not the poor soldier bleeding to death by her feet. But I knew you were there, even before you stepped into the grove.”
“How?”
“I felt you. I felt lots of things. Dying is a curious sort of procedure, I think. You felt powerful and hungry and watchful. I thought you might be my death, until I saw you.”
“And what did you think then?”
He grinned and leaned against one of the new foundation piles. “That I was lucky to die in the presence of such formidable women.”
I blushed, but it was a warm and friendly sensation, like the gentle pressure I felt when Tulo kissed me.
“When I saw you. . .” he began, but he shook his head and reached down to pick up the fallen blade. He wiped it on his loincloth. “Will the spirits disdain some Akane blood, then?”
I grabbed the knife. This time he let me take it. “Haven’t you spilled enough already?”
“Haven’t you? Just this once, Ana. It’s our house, after all.”
I let him. It wasn’t so much blood, I reasoned. And I wanted, I confess, to test the theories of some napulo philosophers about the relative merits of self-sacrifice versus the willing sacrifices of others. He seemed pleased and grim all at once, which reminded me of how he had been at the tensest moments of our grift back in Okika. Perhaps this side of Parech was the one he showed in battle: focused yet subtly joyous. I knew I loved him then. Like a fool, I thought his shedding blood might prove he loved me, too.
I invoked the geas I had devised for the task, one of water and earth, because I had not yet learned how to master more than two of the great spirit manifestations within one binding. I did not want to risk this going badly for the sake of experiment.
“I bind you for protection, to keep this house from decay and destruction so long as there are those with the ties to sustain it.”
The sun had set, but the stars and moon provided enough light for our task. I wondered if Tulo would return soon, and what her spirit sight might make o
f these proceedings.
“I bind you as well,” Parech said, and I felt the redoubled tension in the geas like a bath of ice water on my skin. I glared at him, but he just smirked. Nothing for it, now.
“I offer you his sacrifice,” I said.
“I offer you my sacrifice,” he said, and I threw up my hands and told him to get on with it. He cut beneath his collarbone, since he determined anywhere else would prove difficult while building the house. He walked to each of the six sheared tree trunks, orphaned upright in the earth. He allowed some of his blood to drip on each of them, an expression on his face of such solemnity I found myself comforted. This felt right and proper. This felt powerful, as though whatever else Parech had given the spirits with his sacrifice had been worth more than his blood. When he finished, I knew they were bound so tightly it would take all three of our deaths to release them. The house would be safe. Parech looked at me when we had finished.
“Was that fine, Ana?”
I grabbed a handful of switch grass and pressed it against his collarbone to stop the bleeding. His eyes and his two-toned hair. The laughter in his voice. The house we would build together.
I laid my head on his chest, not speaking, and he held me until Tulo came home.
The first Maaram ships were spotted a week later by soldiers on outposts deep in the northeast coral atolls. The Esselan army was already on high alert, having been warned of the impending Maaram attack by their numerous spies in Okika. As we’d noted at the time, the Maaram had done a very poor job of hiding their intentions. The first battles were minor and deep out at sea. They affected no aspect of life on the mainland, and so we only noted their existence as a curiosity, a topic of conversation late at night when we spoke to each other in contented exhaustion. Progress on the house proceeded. Tulo knew of the geas I was binding into the very cords and timber and wattle of the building, but she seemed disinclined to ask questions. Perhaps she knew everything I could have told her—she could actually see the spirits I had bound to the preservation of our home. After the first night, Parech silently brought home small animals—macaques and pigeons and once even a rat—that I could use as minor, unwilling animal sacrifices. It was enough for our purposes, though I hated the sensation of their screams and their squirming bodies before I gave their souls to the spirits. Parech didn’t seem to care one way or another. He ate their flesh, after all, when most Esselans followed the custom of avoiding meat.
The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Page 29