The Burning City (Spirit Binders)

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Will you stop that? You know I’m not plotting anything. You don’t have to be a rebel to think that you’re hurting everyone with these disappearances. With torture.”

  “Well,” he said, his voice a strangled whisper, “what would a barely literate sailor know, anyway?”

  Ahi began to cry in earnest, breaking into the argument and defusing it. “Shh,” Nahoa whispered, knowing that her daughter could hardly fail to respond to their angry voices.

  “Here,” she whispered, letting Ahi’s plaintive wails cover her own voice. She pushed the worn piece of paper Pano had given her across the table. “I may be barely literate, but I can read this well enough. I want you to free these people. All of them.”

  He picked up the list and looked it over quickly. “Not about politics? Half of these people are known rebels. Or do you think it’s good for the city to fight a civil war two months after 20,000 died in the disaster?”

  “No, of course not,” she whispered, and almost wished Ahi would cry louder so she could be sure the guard outside wouldn’t hear. “But don’t you see, Kohaku? This list is half the reason why the people are fighting. Act less like a tyrant and maybe they won’t fight you like one. You have judges, you have a court—”

  Kohaku slammed his hand on the table, and Nahoa got her wish. Ahi began to wail so loudly that they both winced. “You will not lecture me about this. You couldn’t possibly understand. I’m doing all I can to help these people and—”

  “Would you like to hold her?” she interrupted. Kohaku looked shocked, but he didn’t object. Nahoa stood and walked around the table so they were seated with barely an inch between them. She handed him the screaming infant, and he managed well enough even with one hand. Ahi began to quiet almost immediately. Perhaps she liked Kohaku’s smell as much as her mother did.

  “Nahoa. . .” he whispered.

  “Free those people,” she said, even more quietly. “Or I swear you’ll never see your daughter again.”

  “One of them. . .the apothecary, Lipa. She helped murder my sister. . .”

  Nahoa stared, for she remembered his halting tale of Emea’s death, and even six months ago he had credited the apothecary with doing all she could to save his sister’s life. Now he blamed Lipa for Emea’s death? She’d known he was succumbing to paranoia, but she hadn’t realized how firmly it held him in his grip. Perhaps he truly was insane, like they all said. But all she said was, “Even she. Do you understand?”

  And Pano must have understood something about her husband that she didn’t. Kohaku had just called her an illiterate sailor, but now he looked at her mutely and nodded. She had that power over him. “All right,” he said.

  She let him hold Ahi for a minute longer and then called the guard back in the room. Kohaku didn’t try to touch her before he left. Nahoa found herself, treacherously, wishing that he had.

  Lana woke up the next morning with a headache and a knot of dread in her stomach. It took her a moment to place its source. Of course; she had promised Kohaku that she would see him, and she had planned to do so this afternoon. Only she realized now that much as she valued her memories of him, she was terrified of the man he seemed to have become. After leaving the fire temple yesterday, she’d made discreet inquiries into the fates of the napulo women and the heckler who had been taken away by Kohaku’s guards when she first reencountered him. The answers were unsurprising, but depressed her all the same—no one had heard from the two napulo, but the heckler had turned up dead and bloody just that afternoon. No one had any doubt that Bloody One-hand was responsible. But she had to see Kohaku. Even without her past connection with him, he was the most powerful person in the city. And that meant he might have heard something about Akua or her mother, and she needed any information she could get.

  Still, she thought, she could wait a day or two. An ash rain was blanketing the city in its bleak gray sludge, and she had no desire to travel in that. Instead, she found the strange little black book that Ino had given her just before Nui’ahi had erupted. Ino was the water sprite who inhabited the lake beside Akua’s house. They had, quite improbably, established a wary friendship over the course of her years under Akua’s tutelage. And though Ino was geas-bound not to say, he knew more than anyone (other than Akua herself) of Akua’s ultimate plan. In the months that had followed the eruption, Lana had hardly had a moment to spare for rest, let alone the task of deciphering the cramped and ancient handwriting in the black book. She couldn’t see any way the knowledge in the book would bring her any closer to finding her mother. It was a curious narrative—an account, like the other book she had found in Akua’s collection, written a millennium ago, before the spirit bindings. But as every other method she had used to find Akua and her mother had failed, Lana hoped that perhaps something in the black book would prove worth the struggle of deciphering it.

  The writing was at times so archaic that she needed to spend hours researching the long-disused characters. Spoken Essela had not changed much in a millennium, but the means of writing it certainly had. And the political situation in the islands at the time was complicated enough to make her head spin. She recalled Kohaku attempting to teach her something about the wars between the Esselans and the Maaram, but those long-ago lessons had vanished in a barely recollected haze. Lana knew Okika, the large island where she and her mother had first lived when they left their home, had once been called Maaram, and that they’d spoken a different language in the days before the spirit bindings. Even then, however, Essela had been the dominant language and culture. There had been a great war between the Esselans and the Maaram (they only became Okikan later), and eventually the Esselans had prevailed. Then the great spirit bindings had occurred, making all thoughts of further war and conquest untenable. The Esselan peace had been part of island life for so long that she had a difficult time understanding war as anything other than an abstract concept.

  She studied the book for perhaps an hour, carefully copying in a separate notebook all the characters and phrases she didn’t recognize. Thankfully, each paragraph went by more easily than the last.

  Ino had defied the geas of an astonishingly powerful witch to give this black book to her. Lana only hoped it would provide answers worth the struggle.

  The black book

  I met Tulo and Parech on a battlefield, and if that seems prescient I came to understand that it would have been impossible for the three of us to come together any other way. It was the third battle I’d found that week, a fact I was grateful for, because I could use some of what I lifted from the dead bodies and sell the rest. The Maaram might have conquered the Kawadiri archipelago a generation before, but the native tribes still didn’t seem to know it. There was always some skirmish being fought, some territory to be regained or defended. The forests, I’d learned, were best for finding the odd dead soldier abandoned in haste. Most passersby refused to scavenge, afraid of vengeful ghosts, afraid of what spirits might have fed on the death. I had starved for a month after I landed on the largest island in the archipelago, and I’d learned to fear hunger far more than I feared a dead soldier’s wrath.

  I did not know much about spirits, then. I didn’t fear them either.

  She was the only other girl I’d seen in months, and she knelt among a field of corpses. Her chest was bare, a custom of many of the Kawadiri tribes, and she bent her head forward. She rubbed a length of sennit braid between her fingers; her lips moved in silent supplication. The battlefield was pungent with the stench of blood and spilled intestines, but not too ripe—this battle was only a few hours over. She was praying over a body, another young soldier fallen and abandoned. Her lover? Was she trying to release his ghost? Or was she a dark witch, trying to bind it?

  “If you mean to kill me,” she said, her deep voice carrying easily in the post-battle quiet, “you had best do it fast. But I’m no threat to you.” She spoke in lightly accented Essela, though Maaram was the language of this island. As though there was something about my footf
alls that proclaimed me a foreigner. But an Esselan? Even now the specter of war loomed between the two empires. On the other hand, a century of Esselan dominance in trading had made knowledge of their tongue fairly common on every island I knew. Perhaps she merely wanted to make sure I understood her words.

  I hesitated, my heart pounding with a fear I thought the last few months had beaten out of me. I was directly behind her, far out of her line of sight. I had moved quietly among the corpses, and whatever sounds my sandals might have made were easily covered by the wind even now rustling the treetops.

  “I’m just here to take what I can from the soldiers. I’ll leave yours alone.”

  Her shoulders shook, as though she was laughing. “He’s not mine. So you’re a scavenger? Do you steal from the heroes or the Maaram devils?”

  I walked closer to her. Her hair was thick and wild, with tight corkscrews that bounced near her shoulders. She was younger than I’d guessed at first—my age, or maybe a few years older. I wondered how she had ended up among this grove of the dead. Was she like me? A lone girl, a refugee of floods and famine and plague, driven to the Maaram because of their wealth and power?

  “Does it matter?” I said. “Light fingers make no difference to the dead.”

  She turned from the fallen soldier, her face tight with fury. “You disrespect the dead! It’s a sin before the ancestors, and may they punish you if I can’t.”

  Her words barely registered; I was too curious about the direction of her gaze. Or rather, the lack of it. She stared past my shoulder, her eyes sliding up and down in some sort of ceaseless questing. I looked behind me, and saw nothing but trees and corpses.

  My damp skin felt suddenly chilled, despite the steam rising from the soil. “You’re blind,” I said.

  She clenched her teeth. “And you’re an ignorant Kukichan. May the ancestors flay your traitorous skin.”

  I had to laugh. “I think we have different ancestors.”

  The soldier groaned, and then exhaled in hiccupping bursts. The girl bent once again over her prayer braid and began furiously chanting.

  “He’s alive!” I said, running toward them and kneeling by his side. Only now did I notice the brown wrap and leather braces of a Maaram soldier. “Why would they leave one of their wounded behind?”

  “Because the Maaram are the children of tree snakes. This one was hurt too badly, so they went on without him. And now I must beg the ancestors to prolong his sorry life.”

  “And here I wondered why you hadn’t just slit his throat already.”

  The soldier made that same noise again, the aborted exhale, only this time the corners of his mouth quirked up. I stared.

  “Are you laughing?” I asked the soldier.

  He opened his eyes and squinted at me. “She is,” he said—and it took me a moment to realize he wasn’t speaking Essela, but my own native Kukichan—“exuberant in her hatred. Ask her why. . .” He coughed and his face contorted with pain. “Ask her why she’s here. Why she won’t leave me to die.”

  Blood and mud smeared across his face had hidden what I ought to have recognized immediately. His skin was too dark to be Maaram. Its earth-red undertones marked him as an Akane, the barbarian tribe my Kukichan people had forced onto the smaller islands surrounding Kukicha generations ago. His arms and chest bore the beautifully intricate tattoos of a warrior of his people. How strange for us both to have traveled so far from our homes, only to meet on a Maaram battlefield. Most people from our corner of the world had probably never even met a Maaram, let alone fought in their wars or scavenged on their land.

  “He tells me to ask why you’re here,” I said in Essela. “Though I’m not sure why, as he clearly knows Essela.”

  The girl’s hands clenched the worn prayer braid so tightly she was in danger of snapping it in half. “He has stolen my birthright. A thing of power from my ancestors.” She turned her head to gaze unerringly at the soldier’s face. “And if you won’t tell me where you’ve hidden it, they’ll make you!”

  “It’s gone, Princess,” he said in perfect Essela. “I destroyed it.”

  She moved so quickly I had no time to stop her. The blade she took from a sheath by her waist was obsidian and intricately carved. Expensive for some blind tribal girl begging on a battlefield, but perhaps that’s why the soldier had called her “Princess.” She screamed so loudly as she raised the blade that the vultures circling overhead scattered. But she missed the soldier’s body entirely—biting instead into the earth. I moved to touch the soldier’s forehead; her head shot up. I shuddered again at her disjointed gaze.

  “He’s already dying,” I said. “No need to speed him there.”

  “How would you know what I need? Maybe I could sacrifice him to get my eyes back, since he’s taken them from me.”

  The soldier gave that painful laugh again, and I wondered what kind of person was so driven to mirth on his deathbed. It made me like him. “How did you know this Kukichan girl was in the grove?” he asked the girl. “How did you find me here among all the dead? How can you sense my face, yet miss my chest?”

  The girl’s face was frozen in a revelation that I struggled to piece together. “You’re blind,” I said, “but. . .not just blind. You have some other way of seeing?”

  “He took it from me. He stole the power of my ancestors and destroyed it! You heard him. He’s taken my sight.”

  “And yet you can see,” he said, very softly.

  The girl sat back on her heels, knife forgotten in the mud. She didn’t seem inclined to grab it again, so I turned my attention back to the soldier.

  “What is your name, Akane?” I asked him in Kukichan.

  “Parech,” he said. “And yours, wetlander?” That’s what they called us—because of our rice farming, I suppose.

  “Aoi,” I said.

  He gripped my hand, and I wondered how long it would be before this strange soldier became another battlefield corpse. I thought of the ceremony I had once seen as I waited in the shadows of an earlier skirmish. An Ana—the Maaram honorific for one who wields great power over the spirits—had lit a pipe and begun to dance among the bodies. He moved as though the spirits were lifting him—making his jumps higher, his twirls faster. And as the Ana passed my hiding place, I breathed in his acrid ceremonial smoke, and I felt, just on the edge of my consciousness, that I could see the spirits he supplicated. I felt the power he called, and the force of the death he expiated from that place. The event had stayed with me, and I brooded on it often. Later, I learned that all Maaram soldiers carry a bit of that herb on them. I’d never dared take it. I had that much reverence, I suppose.

  “Will you let me blow your spirit to the gate?” I asked. In Essela, so the girl could understand.

  She looked up from where she huddled, and I saw that she’d been crying. “You use their ceremonies, too?”

  “Why not?” Well, I never had before, but her scorn made me loath to admit it.

  “That’s how the Maaram and Esselans will get us in the end, isn’t it? We’ll just agree to their tyranny for the sake of comfort.”

  I had to roll my eyes. “A blind girl, a scavenger, and a dying soldier are hardly in any position to worry about tyranny. Please. At least the Maaram Anas help save the local harvests. That’s more than I can say for anyone on Kukicha. Or the Kawadiri ancestors.”

  “The old ways have power, scavenger.”

  “And the new ways have evidence.”

  To emphasize my point, I plucked the square of resin-saturated herb from Parech’s satchel along with some flint and a small clay bowl. His eyes had fallen shut, and his breathing was at once shallower and more labored. How long before he passed from the herb’s reach?

  “Parech,” I said. “Are you still with us? It won’t be much longer now.”

  “Oh, he’s still here. That one is bright as a lightning bug. Death will have to drag him past the gate.”

  Whatever Parech had taken from her hadn’t impeded her strange sig
ht. How different the world must look to her. I struck the flint over the resin; it caught easily, releasing a lazy swirl of pungent smoke. I inhaled, and after a moment, so did the girl.

  Parech opened his eyes, and I had the curious sense that I could see the whites glowing as though from a hidden ember. His dying makes him burn even brighter, I thought, and then wondered if the smoke was letting me glimpse what the blind girl saw.

  I took another deep breath of the smoke. It tickled going down my throat, seemed to cling to the insides of my lungs. And then, everything flipped. What had been a dying man on the grass became a torch surrounded by seething spirits. The girl was still herself, but more terrible and beautiful. Her eyes were not merely blind, but black holes that shut out all light. And yet the rest of her was suffused with it—an ethereal silver that reminded me of river nits after moonrise. If I looked at her askance, some creature seemed to be hidden within the folds of her light. A spirit of a fundamentally different nature from those that even now were attempting to feed off of Parech.

  “Ze’s flight,” I whispered. I had undertaken this duty too lightly. The Maaram Ana had made this ritual look simple, routine. And yet, staring at this impossible profusion of spirits, all feeding on the undirected sacrifices of dozens of battlefield dead, I realized that the Ana were, in fact, warriors. The spirits waited to see if my untested power would blow them away and release Parech’s ghost. And if I failed?

  “You can see them, can’t you?” said the girl. She reached across Parech’s body to grip my hand. I returned the gesture with fervor.

  “What will they do. . .what if I’m not strong enough?”

  “They will devour you as a sacrifice. The Maaram Ana sometimes discuss it. I saw it happen once, when I was very little, to a boy who wanted to be shaman.”

  One spirit—a giant yellow frog with a great tadpole tail—edged nearer to Parech and flicked its tongue at his guttering flame. Parech groaned.