The Burning City (Spirit Binders)

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  And maybe that explained his resentment and rage far better than his grief could. So he had risen from the depths and reassumed his half-caste humanity; he had decided to find her. But Kai had not been on the surface a day when he felt the first tremors, the first hint of violence unleashed, greater than anything the islands had seen for more than a millennium. The first wave came hours later, when the sun had dipped below the horizon. It swelled like a mountain; it bore down like an avalanche. He had known it was coming, and so sped his boat to the nearest islands he could help: the rural outer archipelago near the water shrine, where divers much like Lana’s people still harvested jewels from the dwindling populations of mandagah fish. The islanders knew him, though he had never traveled there before. They held him in silent awe and obeyed when he told them to take their boats from the water and move to the center of the island. It took a greater geas than any he had ever used to channel that titanic wave. The water receded before it like a crowd drawing back in the presence of a king. For a moment, the ancient land channels between the islands lay exposed, the seaweed and coral limp and helpless in open air. They seemed to shrink in the deep gray shadow of the wave. But the water that should have by rights crushed the island paused as though in thought. The wind blew mist from its crest that fell like rain. Slowly, the wave began to melt back into the ocean. And then, when the great wave had become nothing more than a series of whitecaps, Kai collapsed and allowed the water to wash him ashore.

  He didn’t forget Lana. He couldn’t. But the world had realigned itself again, and his obligations dragged at him. Floods from the waves he couldn’t stop had destroyed countless communities and killed countless people. And on every island, human lips passed the rumors. There was a black angel loose in the world once again. It was an age of disasters, an age of the spirits. And this black angel was odd, living in Essel as though she was just some girl and not a spirit incarnate, a creature of legends.

  But she is just a girl, he wanted to tell them. And she’s stronger than any of you could know.

  Months passed. Sometimes he felt more like death’s guardian than water’s, so great was the misery he witnessed. So many bodies in the sea, not all of them human. The war between spirits and humans had made casualties of innumerable other creatures: whales, dolphins, sharks, octopods, and enough fish to feed every human for a year. Even the sprites ached at the destruction. A few faded out of existence, absorbed into some other power or perhaps just dissipated. His father, Kai thought, had been wise to die before this. Perhaps he had believed his son’s warnings after all.

  And now he had arrived in Essel, months after he had first set out. His need to see Lana had disturbed his sleep. But now, so close, he found that his feet wanted to stick on the surface of the water. The approaching shore lurched with the sudden fury of his heart. What would she say? Would she even want him anymore after so much time apart? After the harsh way he had treated her? Would the sight of her remind him of the rage he had largely forgotten? Would they be driven apart much the way they had been before, or could this greater disaster help bring them together again?

  But he couldn’t find her. He went to the house they said was hers, but her father regarded him with barely concealed horror.

  “She left last night, guardian,” he said. “I don’t know where she is now.”

  Kai wondered at the clear exhaustion on his face, at the wince he didn’t quite suppress when he mentioned his daughter.

  “Do you know when she’ll return?” Kai asked.

  Her father shrugged. “I don’t know much about Lana these days. She was with that man, that gardener who’s with the rebels.” He laughed and his fingers tightened on the doorway. “Who knows. Maybe she’s with the rebels now.” He looked up at Kai, the last vestiges of sleep giving way to suspicion. “And what does the water guardian want with my daughter?”

  Kai felt his eyes turn to water, felt his skin pale and his tongue grow large and unwieldy in his mouth. But if Lana had not told her father of their history, what right did he have? “She’s the black angel,” Kai said, and her father’s face closed like a shuttered window.

  So Kai asked and found that the whole city knew precisely where to find the rebels and the gardener who helped them. He walked to the lava-slagged, burned-out ruin that was Sea Street. He asked after the gardener and the guards nearly collided in their haste to find him.

  The gardener’s shirt was dark with ash and a stain that Kai recognized as blood. “Are you all right?” he asked the man.

  “It’s not mine,” said the gardener. And for the first time, Kai became scared.

  She was unconscious when they led him to her. He felt it all again: the rush like the ocean, the gentle easing in a place that had grown hard in her absence. An older woman was grimly yanking splinters from the torn flesh in her wings. The blood matted her feathers and made them glint in the lamplight.

  “What happened?”

  “Assassination attempt. Had to be Bloody One-hand—no one else can make arrows that go farther than that doorway.”

  Someone had shot her with that ancient weapon, the bow and arrow, developed a millennium ago by the Esselans in their wars of conquest. He’d seen a rotting example somewhere in one of the hundreds of rooms of the water temple, but never thought to use it. How had the situation in this city deteriorated to the point where there could be assassination attempts made with long-range weapons?

  Kai could barely force the next words from his throat. There was a great deal of blood. She wasn’t moving. “Will she…”

  The older woman shrugged. “She’s lost some blood, but this one is tough. She’ll be fine.”

  So Kai sat. He watched as the apothecary bound the wound. He watched as Lana stirred and grimaced, though she did not wake. The room was chill, but he made no move to light a fire. He watched her. Eventually, when sunlight peeked through the ever-present ash haze in the sky, she shifted, and groaned, and opened her eyes. They stared at each other for a very long time.

  “Why are you here?” Lana asked.

  “I meant to come sooner.”

  “I thought you hated me.”

  “You never thought that, keika.”

  Lana smiled, an expression of such incongruous joy that he had to match it. “No. What does this mean?”

  He pulled a strand of hair from between her lips; he touched the softness of her under-feathers. “I forgive you.”

  Lana had dreamed of Kai—ocean eyes and sky hair and tentative, kind smiles—and awoke with him beside her. She was holding his hand, and the marvel of that distracted her from the dull, ceaseless throbbing in her back. She shifted slowly, carefully, and turned her head. He was asleep in a chair beside her. Not her chair. And this lumpy pallet wasn’t her bed. Then she remembered: an assassin’s arrow and Pano’s hurried flight to rebel territory. Waking up to discover that Kai had come, and it wasn’t a dream and he had told her.

  Tears trickled out before she could stop them. They dripped from her nose onto his hand, and he jerked awake. Even half asleep, he was alert for danger. She wondered what had happened to him in the last few months. His confusion cleared and they regarded each other silently. Those beautiful, malleable eyes had irises this morning, a blue as deep as her mandagah jewel.

  “I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” she said.

  He ran his fingers through her hair and then down her jaw. His expression was so tender her breath caught. “I would have come sooner,” he said. “I was. . .” He looked away from her abruptly and his eyes turned nearly black. “Your Mo’i has a great deal to answer for.”

  Lana stared at him. “But you’ve just come to Essel. Were there other eruptions? Did something else happen?”

  He frowned. “You haven’t heard? The volcano unleashed great towering waves. Thousands of people have been swept out to sea. Crops were flooded. Fish stocks decimated. People are starving, Lana. I’m the water guardian, and there was almost nothing I could do about it.”

 
For a moment, all she could hear was the blood rushing furiously past her ears, the crash of the ocean. She had seen bad storms on her island, before the floods came that destroyed everything. She had seen the way the winds and great waves could wash whole houses out to sea and leave the land so pristine you’d never know anyone had lived there. Involuntarily, her eyes drifted to the open window, and this time she saw the faint outline of the death spirit.

  “Did you know of this?” she whispered to it. But of course it had. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Does the jailer give the prisoner his key?” it said, its cryptic locution curiously reminiscent of a geas. She wondered what it could mean, but when she turned to Kai she saw he was staring at her as though she had gone insane.

  “The death,” she said, “outside the window. Didn’t you hear it?”

  He turned, but the death had vanished again.

  In a torrent stemmed only by occasional moments of exhaustion, she told him of all that had happened since they parted—Ino giving her the book by the lake, the death and the eruption, her mother missing and Akua hidden from her, Nahoa and the machinations with the rebels. At that, she paused.

  “I know there wasn’t much choice, but I wish Pano hadn’t taken me here. I’m in debt to him now.”

  Kai frowned. “Who else could have helped? If the Mo’i wants to kill you. . .”

  “The Mo—Kohaku tried to kill me? I thought it was just some angry Esselan. They hate me, Kai, you know. They think I caused this. As though I could ever. . .” She shook her head violently. “Kohaku couldn’t do this. It’s impossible. Sure, he was angry, but try to kill me?” She thought of the self-important but kindhearted teacher who had so impressed her at thirteen. “He’s the same one who taught me on the island, all those years ago. He isn’t like that.”

  Kai was giving her that look again, as though he was thinking a hundred things he wasn’t sure he should say aloud. “Men change, Lana. Some a great deal. He’s already responsible for killing tens of thousands of souls. And from what I hear, imprisoning scores more. Do you really think he’d balk at killing you, just because of your old connection?”

  “Is the black angel truly so naive?” said Eliki from the door. “I don’t know if I should be horrified or charmed.” Lana turned so she could face the door and winced. Kai helped her sit while Pano joined Eliki.

  “Is it naiveté,” Lana said, “to mistrust the word of the two people who have so much to benefit from putting me in this position?”

  “We don’t kill innocents,” Pano said quickly, putting up a hand to forestall Eliki’s response.

  “Maybe you just wanted to hurt me. Threaten me with Kohaku and I’m suddenly in your power.”

  Lana knew that her theory wasn’t terribly coherent even as she said it, but she didn’t want to believe the other explanation.

  Eliki looked contemptuous. “From what Pano tells me, you’re only alive now thanks to Bloody One-hand’s wife. Even if we would engage in the sort of ploy you’re suggesting, the assassin’s goal was clearly death, not injury. You think we want you dead, when you are so much more useful alive and inciting the populace?”

  Lana found herself slumping against Kai, furiously biting her cheek to keep her exhausted, surprised, betrayed tears from seeping out. Even Kohaku? Would everyone she had loved betray her?

  “She’s hurt and tired,” Kai said, giving Pano and Eliki the look that had quelled scores of defiant spirits. “Perhaps you two should leave.”

  Pano looked angrily at Eliki and walked closer to the bed. “I apologize, black angel,” he said. “Eliki often forgets common courtesy in her dedication to the cause. But what she says is the truth. One-hand tried to kill you yesterday. It was a bow and arrow the assassin used, and your Kohaku is the only one who has them. Our craftsmen have been trying, but they haven’t figured out how to make them fly true.”

  Lana nodded in quiet defeat. A bow and arrow. Even in the lawless age before the spirit bindings, they had been cruel, shocking weapons.

  “And now I suppose you’ll tell me that with Kohaku determined to kill me, I’m only safe here with you?”

  Eliki smiled. “It would appear. Unless you want to quit Essel entirely, and something tells me you won’t do that until you find some clue about your mother.”

  Kai’s eyes were darkening, and just a glance told her he had finally understood her dismay at waking up in rebel territory. He said, “You do know what I am, right? She’s under my protection. You won’t like what happens here if you try to coerce her.”

  He would have said more, but Lana squeezed his hand and forced a cool smile to match Eliki’s. “I’m sure our dear rebel leaders would never dream of making me do something I don’t wish to do. I’m sure they want my participation in their civil war to be fully consensual. I’m sure they will offer me a great inducement for that consent.”

  Pano choked back a laugh, and even Eliki’s smile grew a touch less frigid. “Inducement? Caring for you on our meager resources? Protecting you from the mad Mo’i?”

  “And for that I’m sincerely grateful, though you understand if I don’t want to endanger myself further by participating in your propaganda against the Mo’i. I have to find my mother, after all.”

  Kai was giving her a little sideways smile that made her stomach flip, despite everything. Perhaps after she had rested and the others had gone away, she and Kai could have a true reunion.

  “Oh, how can you think of your mother at a time like this?” Eliki snapped, waving a pale hand as though she would slap her. “Twenty thousand dead! Half the city destroyed, and that despot still sits there in his fortress, dredging up horrors from before the great spirit bindings and destroying our freedoms daily with his edicts and abductions. And here you dare tell us that the tens of thousands of mothers who are dead or missing are nothing compared to yours? You, with the influence to make the whole city understand how their leader has betrayed them, you dare tell me you won’t help because your stupid mother is missing?”

  Lana’s fingernails dug into her palms, though she hardly noticed. She was aware of a desperate fury and a cold, private fear that what Eliki had said was right. That she was truly the venal and selfish person who could place her own problems high above a sea of everyone else’s misery. Perhaps everyone does that—but not everyone had, as she did, the power to help others. Faced with the moral choice, Lana wondered if her singular focus on Leilani and Akua meant she was making the wrong one. She glanced at Kai, and then quickly away. She knew he was thinking of the conflict that had driven them apart months ago, and the horror it had taken him so long to forgive: even knowing all she did about Pua and the effects of the geas, she couldn’t regret the binding that had saved her mother.

  “Your causes are not mine, Eliki,” she said. “Do you realize what your rebellion is leading to? A civil war. And you ought to know precisely what war does to the spirit bindings.”

  “That’s the Mo’i’s burden. He’s caused this. He’s broken all the rules. So long as he keeps his power, no one will feel compelled to keep within the boundaries of the bindings.”

  Unexpectedly, Kai spoke. “He’s destroyed the system, Lana. And without that, we might all destroy each other.

  “We might all help free the spirits and commit mass suicide,” Lana said.

  Kai’s eyes were ice pale and remote as a wind. “And so you let Essel bleed to death instead.”

  Lana threw up her hands and winced. “Oh, are you a radical now? The water guardian?”

  “Well,” he said, so softly she wondered if the others heard him, “at least your goals and desires can be relied upon, Lana.” And now he was certainly speaking of Pua. She wiped her eyes and turned from him. Perhaps their relationship truly was impossible. But she couldn’t bear to think of it just now.

  “My mother is not more important than all the others in this city, but she is mine. You will help me, or I refuse to help you.”

  Eliki stared at her for a moment,
and then turned away in disgust. In the end, Pano was the only one who would meet her eyes. At least he seemed understanding.

  “I’ve told my people to look out for any information about a one-armed witch and an outer islander,” Pano said. “I’ve heard nothing definite, but someone at the fire temple claims the head nun has started sending supplies to a house on the far edge of the city.”

  “What does that have to do with my mother?”

  “Probably nothing. But he said there were two mandagah jewels in the package. He noticed because they’re so rare these days. I thought your mother might have been a diver.”

  Lana could have stood up and danced, damn their disapproving expressions. Mama, she thought, I’ll find you. I’ll stop Akua, whatever she’s planning. In her joy she turned to Kai, but he had gone cold and distant beside her. And so she found herself looking out the window again, to the death, opaque as a man against the ruined street. Its mask mouth stretched wide. She was dimly aware that even a few months ago, the sight would have disturbed her.

  “Closer, Lana,” it said.

  She laughed. Beside her, Kai turned. The death vanished immediately. He looked back at her ecstatic face and shuddered.

  6

  LANA HARDLY SAW KAI OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS. He said that he was taking stock of the city and finding any clues he could about the state of the spirit bindings, but she knew that he was avoiding her. He hadn’t said so, but he probably believed every one of the cruel accusations Eliki had hurled at her. And perhaps he was right. Perhaps that time on Okika had damaged her—made her too aware of parental sacrifice, too beholden to her mother’s love. Kai, who had grown up almost entirely apart from any other humans, and often had difficulty interacting with them, seemed to drown in his capacity for empathy. It had led him to protect her, when she’d been about to die in front of an inn on the rice islands. He hadn’t known a thing about her, but he cared anyway. Who was she to deserve someone like that? If she slept alone, at least she’d grown used to it.