The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (39 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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“Your rebels are going to win,” Makaho said. Nahoa looked at her sharply—as well she might, Makaho thought with grim amusement.
“They’re not—”
“They would have lost, you understand. Even with this snow the water guardian nearly killed himself over. The rebels fought because someone gave them plans for the one weapon they could not build on their own. And so they followed these plans exactly—as of course they would. But nobody there knew that the strength of a bow is fatally compromised when the wide middle isn’t shaved nearly flat. Nobody would have known until firing four or five arrows—perhaps the precise number one might fire to test it, just to see if it works, yes? But after that, snap! The bow falls apart. Useless. But they didn’t know, and their army is already engaged. And the snow may fall, but it can’t fall forever. And when it stops, their bows will still snap and our bows will still shoot true. And
they would have lost
.”
“But now. . .now they won’t.” Nahoa seemed very frightened.
“Yes,” Makaho said, more gently now. “A new player has entered the ring. I didn’t foresee that this might spill outside our borders. That sort of thing hasn’t happened in a thousand years.”
Nahoa stared into the fire and kept her gaze there when she spoke. “The plans were fakes.”
“Yes,” Makaho said.
“You meant to trap me into sabotaging the rebels.”
“Not you in particular. Just their informant. I didn’t realize it was you until you took them. I was surprised.”
“But you didn’t give me the guard until three days ago. You must’ve known about the plans for weeks!”
“I didn’t give you the guard because of your disloyalty, Nahoa. I told you—he was for your and Ahi’s safety.” Makaho shook her head, remembering her conversation with Kohaku less than an hour before. She had told him what he demanded to know. Oh, great fire forgive her, but she had told him. “I told him to attend to his other duties. There’s no more need for him now.”
“You. . .tell me what you mean.”
Makaho had to admire her directness. “I know who laid the geas that poisoned your daughter.”
Nahoa waited, her face a picture of silent anguish. Makaho relented. “Sabolu,” she said. “Though not of her own volition. The orders, the geas, and the object it was tied to, came from a mind far more calculating.”
“Yours?” Nahoa said, though Makaho could see in her eyes she was flailing.
“Of course not, my lady. Even were I not an essentially decent human being who would never harm a child for political gain, I have absolutely nothing to gain by killing Ahi. And everything to lose.”
“Where is she?” he had asked, his face a mask of rage and his voice as calm as still waters. Great flame, great flame, what have I done?
“Then who?”
“The rebels.”
“Not Pano!”
Makaho shrugged. “I don’t know who among them.”
This information shocked Nahoa into tears, which told Makaho all she needed to know about the depth of her loyalty to them. She had thought that perhaps she’d informed occasionally out of spite, but it seemed the ties went deeper than that.
“You will not follow me,” he had said. And she did not. She waited, but she did not follow.
“There’s something else,” Makaho said, though the girl was still struggling to control her sobs. Was her worldview cracking? Had she imagined herself to be some flaming revolutionary? “Your husband wanted me to discover who tried to kill Ahi. I gave my word to tell him what I knew.”
Nahoa’s head snapped up. She wiped her eyes. “You told him about Sabolu.”
What could she say in the face of that horror? It was just a mirror. “Yes.”
Without a word, Nahoa stood and walked out. She went straight down the main temple steps and around the front to the stables. This time, Makaho followed. The door had not been latched. It swung wide in the wind. From the outside, they could hear the horses snorting in some kind of agitation, but nothing else.
“Sabolu!” Nahoa called, before she stepped over the threshold. A name like some sort of talisman, a light held before her to banish the darkness. Makaho stood half naked in the snow, hesitant as a little girl, until she heard the sound of Nahoa retching onto straw.
Great flame, great flame, what have I done?
Makaho walked inside. As if in a dream, she saw what Nahoa must have, before she turned away for her sloppy grieving. There was a great deal of blood all over the dirt and straw floor, and the smell seemed to be agitating the horses, particularly a tawny mare who kept nosing the body as though to push it awake.
The body. Kohaku had cut her throat. No, that wasn’t accurate. He had ripped out her throat, vocal box and all. He had stabbed her in the chest, though it was unclear if that had happened before or after he killed her. Her expression was slack, her eyes closed, and yet she still gave an impression of agony Makaho knew she would never forget.
“So many dead already,” Nahoa whispered. “So many dead. And you told him.”
Great flame.
“She almost killed your daughter.”
“She was a child! She couldn’t have known what she was doing.”
“And if she did?”
“You think she deserved this?”
Makaho accepted the withering scorn as her due. She should not have asked that.
“Leipaluka,” Nahoa whispered.
“The dead soldier?” Makaho asked.
“Sabolu gave us the name. She was trying to find anyone who knew her. Now they’re both past the gate.”
“
Se maloka selama ua ola,”
Makaho began—
 
—“
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.”

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