She sat in a tall chair covered in cushions and near to the fire. His reading chair. He loved that chair. Now, with his sister’s hair tumbling over the arm, he knew he’d never be able to relax there again. Her eyes were the only aspect of her appearance that gave away her true nature: instead of the green he had loved, they were a dense, flickering blue, like the flame at the heart of the fire temple. The fire with which he had made his now infamous bargain.
“I should never have ordered her killed,” Kohaku said, with more energy than he intended. “You goaded me into it. . .to kill Lana. . .” He found himself shivering. He was glad Lana hadn’t died.
His sister smiled sweetly. “I could never goad you into something, dear brother. You have all the power in this relationship.”
“You torment—”
“You’re alive. And the Mo’i besides. You could just ignore me.”
And yet he found that to be the one thing he could not do. He could scream and rage and curse her in every ancient language he had studied at the Kulanui, he could kill a dozen people to placate her, he could reason and cajole and laugh, but he could not ignore. She was his sister. Even if she wasn’t.
“It’s too late, anyway,” he said, pushing aside the pile of paper and standing. “She’s gone public with everything she accused me of. If I kill her now, I’d just inflame the whole city against me.”
His sister laughed. He had, by now, grown used to that laugh, though it was nothing like how she had laughed when she lived. His sister had been deaf since she was seven years old, after all, and though she could make sounds, they came from her throat as though down a long tunnel, distorted and made strange by distance and time. The spirit’s laugh was clear and painfully close. “Far too late for that, dear brother. It might cause some temporary problems when she turns up murdered, but the people of this city have no great love for a black angel. They’ll forget. For now. But who knows what she’ll turn into if you let her live?”
Kohaku began to pace the room—four steps to the fireplace, ten to the other side of the room, and seven back to his desk. He had nearly killed Lana. Now Emea wanted him to try again. “I can’t murder someone just on the suspicion of their potential!”
“But you can murder them on the suspicion of their thoughts?”
“You yourself told me I can’t let subversive thinking propagate freely among the populace. They had to serve as examples.”
“And I’d say a black angel would make a huge example.”
Kohaku rubbed his knuckles into his temples. There was less hair there now than just a few months ago. He was balding, turning gray, getting stomach problems like his father and worry lines like his mother. Kohaku had always expected to get old. He remembered what he had been like on Lana’s island all those years ago, teaching students and envisioning a career that had seemed assured: a meteoric rise through the Kulanui, a young rustic protégé who would blossom under his tutelage. . .
He had tried to kill Lana. She’d had a puppy crush on him. She would spend hours with that friend of hers, the one who died in the floods afterward, peeling oranges and giggling.
“No!” he said, pausing in sudden fury before his usurped chair. “I refuse. I will not stoop so low. Once, in self defense. No more. Besides, the soldier said the bolt went home. It’s immoral to attack an injured enemy.”
Emea raised her dark eyebrows. “And you imagine she could fight back before? Kill her, brother. The rebels will use her,” she said. “They will fight you. You’d be safer with her dead.”
“Then I will be less safe.”
Something in his steadfast refusal must have been new, for she fell silent. Ghost-Emea was almost never silent.
“Can you imagine it?” Kohaku said after a moment. His voice was filled with bitter humor. “We should have a celebration.”
Emea gave a quizzical stare. “Should we?”
“We have at last, dear sister, discovered a line that Bloody One-hand will not cross.”
7
THE REBELS RECEIVED UNEXPECTED NEWS the next morning. The fire guardian, Senona Ahi, had sent word to the fire temple to expect his presence sometime in the coming weeks. The news had leaked almost as soon as it arrived, and shocked those who heard it. It was unprecedented—even for Essel—to receive even one diplomatic visitation in each generation from the guardians. Two different guardians arriving at one time was a sure indication of troubled times, even more so than the existence of a black angel.
Pano told them over their morning meal. Lana felt Kai stiffen against her and knew his eyes had gone hard and chilly even without looking up at him. She understood his concern, but all such emotions seemed separated from her by a hazy shroud of wonder. Kai had returned to her. Kai had forgiven her as much as he was able. Kai still loved her. Eventually, she knew, the old problems would start to encroach on this peace, but she would hold onto it for as long as she could.
“Is my presence known here?” Kai asked.
Pano shook his head. “A few rumors. Nothing credible.”
“I suppose I’ll have to confirm the rumors. Your fire temple is in for a shock.”
“Don’t underestimate them. The head nun acts harmless, but she’s nothing but politics and intrigue. I don’t know what her endgame is, but she’s ruthless at playing it.”
Pano’s voice had taken on such an uncharacteristic edge as he said this that Lana sat up and took a good look at him. He seemed tired, as usual. He had spent nearly all night out, and clearly some of that had been at the fire temple.
“How are Nahoa and the baby?” she asked, and was rewarded by his sharp look of relief.
“Little Ahi is healthy as a fish. Getting fat, too. Only the lady and her maid are allowed to touch the baby now. They’re all tired, and no wonder.” He smiled, his eyes distant, and Lana wondered at the interest he had taken in those two.
“Will you meet him, Kai?” she asked.
He nodded. “It’s time I learn what I can. Senona will have his own information. And perhaps we both can confront the Mo’i with it.”
“One-hand is even more dangerous than the nun,” Pano said. “At least Makaho is sane. You see what the Mo’i did to your black angel.”
Kai shrugged. Lana realized that the past year had stripped much of the diffident, awkward gentleness from him. He had always known how to love, how to care; his aunt had taught him that. But his recent time among humans had taught him to fight, to distrust, to lie. He wasn’t suited for it, but he had forced himself anyway. “I’m the water guardian,” he said. “Short of a mob attack, there isn’t much he can do to harm me.”
Lana squeezed his hand, but he didn’t seem to notice. He left a few minutes later, and Pano followed him. Lana allowed them both to think that she would spend the day resting, but as soon as she was alone she found a cloak and the paper upon which Pano had scrawled the location of the house in the seventh district. Kai had brought the cloak back from her apartment with a terse note from her father, wishing her a speedy recovery. Her father didn’t mention Leilani, but she read the concern behind his words. Probably of far greater importance to him than Lana herself, she thought sadly. What would he think when he read the rebel broadsheets explicitly claiming Lana’s support? He’d been careful to only lend his help in areas controlled by Kohaku’s forces. He’d condemned the violence from both sides, but it seemed to her that he held the rebels more at fault. They were fighting against the legitimate government, after all. He already thought her some weird, freakish creature. Every time she called a geas, it seemed a little more of his affection slipped away. And yet she couldn’t stop doing it, because how else would she find Leilani? It had seemed so simple when they first found each other. But without her mother as a bridge, they were strangers to each other.
With hardly a wince she plucked out a feather and muttered a quick geas to the wind spirit, binding it to disguise her appearance. She preferred to reserve her sacrifices for truly important things and not matters of convenience,
but she couldn’t afford to be remarked upon in the street. Kohaku might hear and try to kill her again. And she especially didn’t want Makaho to have any idea she’d found the house. She knew her geas had worked when the people in the streets—some reinforcing the burned buildings, others clearing away debris—only gave her the briefest of glances. Anyone who stared too long would probably be able to see through it, but she was safe enough for now.
Lana didn’t have much money—the utility of which was decreasing daily in any case—so she took her time and walked. The ash was so deep in some places that Lana had to walk around until she found a path someone had shoveled through. The drifts on either side were so high she couldn’t even see the sun. She pulled the edge of her cloak over her mouth and nose so she wouldn’t breathe too much of the acrid air. She had heard of what happened here in the weeks immediately after the eruption. Ten thousand deaths on impact, and then thousands more following as people died of their wounds or of exposure or starvation. First district residents got the last of the Mo’i’s food and medicine—when they got it at all.
When the rebel forces had stepped in to fill the gap, they were welcomed by the people. In the chaos, no one noticed at first that this part of the city was now being controlled by a different, ad hoc government. It took three weeks for Kohaku to act. He armed his guards for the first time in living memory and sent them in to quell the insurrection. They failed, of course. It’s very hard to fight a battle in a densely packed part of the city where everyone hates you. After the first skirmishes, the rebels armed themselves as best they could. They drew their line at Sea Street, using the mountainous lava flows as organic barriers. An uneasy ceasefire had held until now, but as Lana had gathered from listening to Eliki and Pano for the last several days, Kohaku’s use of the ancient bows and arrows had changed the situation. With at-a-distance weapons, Kohaku could attack them at his leisure while his troops stayed out of harm’s way. And now that the cold was setting in, food shortages threatened to starve everybody before they could find a way to fight back. It seemed likely that she had picked the losing side.
Only soldiers were walking the streets when she finally reached the massive pile of hardened lava that marked the border with the seventh district. This wasn’t so heavily barricaded as the border on Sea Street. Compared to the rest of Essel, the seventh district was the provincial backwater, largely unchanged for the last thousand years. Back when the city of Essel had taken up only a fraction of the island, the area of this district had been distant farmland. Now it was nominally part of the city, but plants far outnumbered humans and buildings. And that was a good thing, because otherwise all of Essel might have starved to death in the weeks after Nui’ahi erupted.
Ash choked even the fields that hadn’t been abandoned, and mixed with the dirt of the unpaved road into a hard gray sludge that smacked at her sandals and coated her ankles. Pano had said the house was near the western beaches, in an area of town known to the locals as the Rushes. With the noon sun shining down in a clear, cloudless sky, Lana finally felt warm enough to bunch the cloak under her arm. A breeze blew and she took a deep breath. As always, that unmistakable sharpness of ocean air, even from the saline waters that surrounded Essel, sliced through her heart like a serrated blade. If she closed her eyes, the rich earth from the nearby farms, the silence, the distant ocean, could almost make her believe that she was thirteen again and back home. That she and her mother were still divers, harvesting jewels from mandagah fish and following the path her ancestors had carved out for more than a thousand years.
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were about to cry.”
Lana’s eyes snapped open. The death was beside her on the deserted road, mask neutral, but its voice amused. “How do you know I’m not?” she asked. Her heart was certainly full enough.
“You haven’t cried in months.”
She stared at it. Months? But she realized it was right. She hadn’t even known. She’d cried often enough in her life. It was just that, lately, there hadn’t seemed to be a point. Or perhaps there was too much of one, and no relief to be had by indulging in it. “You sound as though you spend your days observing me,” she said. “Am I so interesting?”
“All humans are so interesting.”
“Then why not spy on another?”
“Oh, now you’re playing innocent?”
She had to smile. “What should I play?”
“War,” it said, “is a game of strategy. You may have heard that it is generally prudent to study one’s opponent.”
“This. . .between you and me. This is war?”
“The war isn’t between you and me. But it’s war nonetheless.” Its voice, which had been hard and frightening, softened. “Don’t forget that, Lana, if you hope to survive.”
It vanished. She might have smiled at her burst of affection, if she had not been simultaneously aware that the death had once again reminded her of its duty to kill her. She should not have forgotten. It disturbed her that she had.
In the Rushes, abutting the western dunes, the buildings looked old enough to predate the spirit bindings. They were made of strong stone and wood from the long-depleted red acacia groves. Only the fire temple and the Kulanui still had buildings in these ancient architectural styles. The centuries had forgotten this section of the city. And even the greatest disaster Essel had seen in a thousand years had not done very much to damage it, aside from some dustings of ash from the latest gray rain. The air was chill, but not unbearably so, and Lana took her time as she walked past the squat buildings with their broad, flat roofs and raised foundations. Some of the windows held cloudy, rough-cut glass as old as the buildings themselves. The citizens looked less disaster-struck than elsewhere in the city. Children played in the streets and a few stores had opened for business. She offered one vendor a hair ribbon in exchange for a jackfruit pastry and it only took him a moment to judge the deal fair. A great deal of the city had begun to resort to a form of ad hoc barter. She asked after the street with the house and learned that it was this very one, just a mile further down the road.
“Right on the dunes,” the man said. “But we don’t go there much,” he added, just as she was turning to leave. “It’s real old, but no one’s lived there in years. No one takes care of it, but it stays upright. Winds, floods—nothing cracks its foundation beams. No rot touches its timber. Anyone who’s tried to stay there always leaves quickly. The last one claimed it was haunted.”
The vendor’s tone and face were still perfectly friendly, but she recognized a warning to an outsider when she heard it. “But it isn’t haunted?” she said carefully.
He bent forward. “Nothing haunts the rushes but spirits, keika, and I suspect you know we’ve got plenty of those.”
His gaze lingered a moment too long on the spread of her wings and Lana felt her breathing hitch and her cheeks flush. The disguising geas still held; she could feel its binding, but this man somehow suspected what she was anyway.
“After what happened to Nui’ahi,” she said, “I’m sure we must all be swimming in spirits.”
He gave a tiny shrug and laughed. “You’re probably right at that. Why, we just had some delegation from the great fire temple itself up through here, and I’m sure our poor neighborhood hasn’t seen their like since the days that old house was first built.”
He was fishing for something. And yet, he still didn’t seem very threatening. It made sense that an important man in a neighborhood like this would take note of any outsiders who passed through, whether fire temple representatives or a lone girl like Lana. “The fire temple? Truly? I’d heard they were hiding themselves in that great complex of theirs. Afraid of the angry hordes or something.”
“We thought it strange, too. Most of the seventh is loyal to the rebels, and the Rushes are no exception. And even stranger, keika, they were seeking out the same ancient spirit house you are.”
Lana found herself curiously steady. Her heart might be pounding, bu
t it felt more like exhilaration than terror. I’m the black angel, she thought.
Ignoring the pain from her healing wound, she stretched out her wings until they splayed against the westerly sunlight and cast them both in shadow. He frowned. He could tell something was there, just not quite what. Then, deliberately as she could, she bit the corner of her tongue just hard enough to bleed.
“Let this one see,” she muttered, and his eyes widened. She’d never manipulated a geas quite like that before, and so felt a distant, secondary pleasure at her growing mastery.
“I think,” she said, over his quiet shock, “that we are probably going there for quite different reasons.”
He grinned. “I don’t doubt it, keika. I’ve read what they wrote about you. It means a lot to know the black angel believes in the cause.”
Lana nearly grimaced. She couldn’t tell him that her support was prompted far less by belief than by circumstances and expediency. So she forced a smile and said, “I trust you understand how dangerous it will be if the fire temple learns of my visit here.”
He took an extra pastry from the warming coals and handed it to her. “We haven’t survived so long without learning to keep our own counsel. We’re as tired of One-hand as everyone else in this city.”
There was something about the force of the statement—as often as she’d heard things like it for the past several months—that made Lana feel nearly ashamed of her own ambivalence. She thanked him and went off quickly.
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in the rebels’ cause, but violence could bring an even greater disaster to Essel and the rest of the islands. The more she saw of what Kohaku had done to the city since the eruption, the more she sided with the rebels. But the fact was that secret imprisonment and occasional assassination, however unjust, would do nothing to disrupt the great spirit bindings. A full-fledged civil war certainly could. And as the rebels hadn’t taken leave of their senses or their morals, she felt like they bore more responsibility for understanding this existential threat and ceasing hostilities. Was the nominal freedom of the island worth a hundred thousand more deaths?
The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Page 16
