The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (12 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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“What do you want?” the rebel guard asked. His tone was brusque, but not unkind. And honestly, such directness was a relief after her meeting with Kohaku.
“I’d like to speak with Pano.”
His hand tightened on the haft of his adze. “What do you know of Pano? What do you want with him, black angel? I won’t have you hurting him.”
“Stand down, Tope. It’s all right. I asked her to come, and here she is.” Pano climbed the lava slag they were standing upon and touched the boy lightly on the shoulder. Then he gestured to Lana. “Follow me,” and Lana was left to awkwardly balance herself as they climbed across the dried lava flows, deeper into the first district. Rebel territory, Lana thought, but the frisson of danger she expected to feel was undone by the utter normalcy of the scene behind the lines. She saw the same destruction, the same fire and ash, but perhaps slightly less desperation. It appeared the rebels took care of their people at least as well as the Mo’i. And they hadn’t caused the devastation in the first place.
There were no undamaged buildings within sight of Sea Street, but Pano led her into one that was still mostly standing. It looked like an ancient tree nearby had borne the brunt of the fire, sparing the meeting house. Everyone they passed nodded to Pano, which confirmed her suspicion that he was an important member of the rebel movement, perhaps even its leader. But when they finally entered the main room—roughly patched with scavenged wood and heated by a smoky fire—someone else was seated before a short table piled with papers. She was an older woman with skin so unusually pale it reminded Lana of Ino, the water sprite. Her hair was thick and frizzy, the color of dirty sand, and held back from her face with a blue headband. Her eyes were the oddest shade Lana had ever seen—pink, like a washed-out sunrise. She’d never met anyone with this sort of coloring before, and even the air in the room seemed to heat when the woman leveled that uncanny gaze at her. No question, Lana thought, of who had led here.
“Eliki,” Pano said lightly, pushing Lana ahead of him. “Look what just flew in.”
The woman—Eliki—gave her such a thorough look that Lana fidgeted. “Fascinating, as usual, Pano,” she said. Her voice was clear and firm. It carried much the way Pano’s had on the street the other day. She sounded, Lana realized, like one of the elders back on her island. Like Okilani, who perhaps had always known, it occurred to Lana for the first time, about the second jewel Lana had found on the morning of her initiation.
“You’re very young,” Eliki said, addressing Lana.
Lana shrugged. Eliki gave the barest of smiles. “And yet I suspect you’ve seen things I can’t even imagine. These are not times when one has the luxury of youth. My daughter was about your age when she died.”
“What happened to her?” Lana asked, though she wondered if she should have just nodded politely.
“She drowned. Her ship capsized in a storm. Almost everyone was lost.” Eliki said this so brusquely Lana didn’t dare offer condolences, and Pano forestalled them anyway by offering her a stool.
“So, I didn’t think you’d take me up on my offer so soon,” Pano said, once they’d all settled. “What brings you here?”
Eliki raised her pale eyebrows. “He means, what do you want?”
Lana swallowed. She was obviously a curiosity to them, but she didn’t want to think of what they would do if they perceived her as a threat. “I’m trying to find my mother.”
Lana expected this to surprise Eliki the way it did everyone else—as though just because she was the black angel she must have sprung from the earth fully formed—but Eliki just nodded.
“And you think we can help?” she said.
Lana explained her search for Akua and her suspicions of Kohaku. “I think he saw something, but he won’t say. I know Makaho is involved, but she’ll never give anything away.”
Pano stroked his chin thoughtfully. “A one-armed witch? I haven’t heard of anyone like that, but I could poke around. Ask some questions.”
“I’d be incredibly grateful.”
Eliki rapped Pano’s thigh with the edge of a book. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said. “And what are you going to do in return, if we help you?”
“I have some money. It’s not much—”
“We don’t want your money. It isn’t much use out here, anyway. We prefer barter.”
Lana hardened her expression. It wouldn’t do to let this woman see how much she intimidated her. “I don’t know what else to offer you.”
She laughed. “You’re the black angel! There’s a thousand things you could offer.”
“I don’t have any power here. Sometimes I think I’m a hairbreadth away from being thrown out of the city!” Pano nodded. “It’s true, Eliki. We met when I saved her from a mob.”
“I know how you met, Pano. But listen to her. She waltzed up to the Mo’i’s house and they took her in to see him just like that.
That
is power. Now, the question is, what can it do for us?”
Lana didn’t like the direction this was heading at all. She shook her head. “No, you don’t understand, I doubt Kohaku will want to see me again anyway. We had an argument before I left.”
This seemed to interest Eliki even more. “An argument? With Bloody One-hand? Explain.”
Lana felt her cheeks get warm. This wasn’t going very well. She started to regret her impulsive decision to come here. Why had she thought they would help her when Kohaku wouldn’t? Because Pano had seemed kind when he saved her on the street? But still, she’d already come.
“I told him I knew what he’d done,” she said. “I mean, that I knew how he’d lost his hand. And he tried to deny it, but great Kai, he was talking to someone who’s made geas with two of the great spirits. As though I wouldn’t know exactly what bargain he made? I was furious. I stormed out.”
Eliki and Pano shared a shocked look. “You are sure?” Pano said after a moment. “There’s no doubt in your mind that he traded his hand to become Mo’i?”
“And weaken the binding in exchange. But everyone knows that. I can’t go down the street without hearing someone say it.”
“People say many things they don’t really believe,” Eliki said carefully. “They curse the spirits, and then bring extra large wreaths for the solstice fires. Just because some people suspect doesn’t mean they believe.”
Lana’s skin prickled. They seemed so surprised. “Well,” she said uncomfortably. “They should, because Kohaku is responsible for all of this. I mean, he might not have known. . . .I’m sure the fire spirit misled him, minimized the danger. It isn’t as though he went into the chamber vowing to burn 20,000 people to death, but. . .”
“He’s responsible, nevertheless.” Eliki’s tone was hollow and clipped, like when she’d described her daughter’s death.
Pano stood and walked to one of the windows covered in fresh oil paper. “This is amazing,” he said, running a hand through his salty hair. “Amazing.” He whirled on Lana. “Explain everything. Step by step. I’ll write it down so I don’t miss anything.” He took a few long strides and knelt before her. “The trouble was we all thought he must have, but it didn’t make sense. Everyone gets burned to death in the great fire. That’s the whole point of the ritual. To sacrifice the penitents and keep the fire spirit bound. In return, we get a leader. So, how was One-hand’s sacrifice different from all the others? Why did it go the other way?”
Lana suddenly understood. The mechanisms of the spirits and their bindings were as natural to her as the tides, as the phases of the moon. Her mother had explained it many times as she was growing up. In the outer islands, the spirits were very close, and life wasn’t stable or easy enough to forget what must seem like a rustic superstition here in this city. And then all of her time with Akua had ground it deeper into her bones. But most Esselans didn’t understand how
anything
worked, no matter that it had become central to their very existence.
“The power of the geas depends on your desire, what you invoke, which spirit you invoke it for. A geas is a binding, but that power is in the unbinding as well. A black angel’s sacrifice released the wind spirit, remember?”
Eliki gasped. “Of course! How could we have forgotten that story?”
Pano shook his head. “I never heard it told like that. I heard she killed herself over the grief of loving it.”
“This goes in the next pamphlet,” Eliki said. “All of it. The details about how spirit bindings work, all confirmed by our very own black angel.”
Lana bolted to her feet and backed away. “Oh no,” she said. “You can’t use me like this. I need to find my mother, not get stoned on a street corner.”
“Why would they blame you when they can blame the Mo’i?”
Lana grimaced. “You can’t. I need Kohaku. Yelling at him is one thing. If you print this, I may never find her.”
Eliki stood, her erect carriage radiating every bit as much anger as Lana felt. “So, is this the thanks we get for helping you?”
“You’ve done nothing for me yet!”
“You doubt our word?”
“Of course!”
Pano put a hand on Eliki’s shoulder. “She’s right,” he said softly. “We need to give her something. Earn her trust. This news can wait.”
Eliki glared at Lana with those disconcerting eyes for a moment longer and then nodded to Pano. “Fine. You see if you can find the one-armed witch. And this one should pray Kohaku doesn’t find some way to take her like he has all the others. You may be the black angel, child, but anyone who cares to look can see you’re still just flesh and blood.”
 
Ahi was dying. Nahoa couldn’t think of any other way to say it. The infant had started to lose her appetite at noon the day before. By that evening she cried in agony at the slightest touch and was so hot Nahoa had to bathe her in ice water. Ahi grew weaker by the hour, no matter what she and Malie did to ease her suffering. She knew children died all the time. Illness took them harder and carried them away faster. Nahoa’s own mother had lost her first child to a wasting sickness. But Lei’ahi had always been so strong and healthy—Nahoa had never even thought to worry over the danger.
Nahoa had screamed at Makaho, begging and demanding the horrible, useless woman to do something to save her child. The nun had sent for several apothecaries, but they’d prescribed tinctures of herbs that Ahi had quickly vomited back up. Then Makaho had merely shaken her head and said, “It will be as the spirits will it.” Which was the worst sort of hypocritical piety, Nahoa knew, since the whole reason for the fire temple’s
existence
was humans taking the spirits into their own bloody hands. But what did Nahoa know of bindings? How would a spirit stop the horror that was even now sucking her daughter’s life away?
It was midnight again, and Ahi had finally fallen into a fitful sleep. Her breathing was like iron rasping against stone, and her skin was so hot that Nahoa wrapped another damp cloth over them both.
“Ahi, sweet Ahi,” she whispered. “Come on, girl. You can make it. You were born in the fire, weren’t you? A little fever can’t hurt.”
Ahi sighed with a painful wheeze and hiccupped. Nahoa kissed the crown of her head, too exhausted to even cry.
“Would you like me to take her?” Malie said.
Nahoa shook her head. Malie looked as tired as she felt. The two of them had taken turns caring for Ahi since she fell ill, but neither had gotten more than a few minutes of sleep. She still might resent Malie’s role in bringing her to the fire temple, but now she couldn’t imagine anyone she’d rather have with her. Malie had borne the endless misery without complaining. If she hadn’t been there, Nahoa might have let grief claim her hours ago.
Malie slumped against the wall beside her, eyes lidded but not quite shut.
“I think you should contact him,” Malie said.
“Who?”
“The Mo’i. If Makaho won’t help. . .”
Nahoa clamped her teeth down on a sob. Malie was right. Kohaku would do anything to save his daughter. He loved as fiercely as he hated. If anyone could find a witch, someone to wrest her daughter from the death’s grip, it would be him. And yet, the moment she asked for his help, she would once again be entirely in his power. How could she do that after she’d given so much to be free? And yet how could she deny her daughter this one last chance?
“Oh crap,” she said, feeling a tear slide down her warm cheek, and then another. “Crap, crap, crap. Malie, I don’t know if I can bear it—”
The maid put her arm around Nahoa’s shoulder. “Shh,” she whispered. “It’ll be all right. I’ll go with you. It’ll be all right.”
The three of them fell asleep like that, exhausted and hurting, and Nahoa only awoke when Ahi did. She was coughing again. Nahoa adjusted her arms to relieve some of the pressure and glanced up.
Pano was in the room, staring at her like he’d seen a spirit.
“Nahoa,” he said, his voice so low she could hardly hear it. “What’s the matter with Ahi?”
She was so tired that it did not seem very odd to find Pano here again, though she had not expected it. She figured he’d leave her alone after she helped him free those people. “She’s sick. She’s very sick. Pano—I think she might. . .”

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