The Burning City (Spirit Binders)

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  It was nighttime and snowing and the black angel had silently watched their camp for days. No one expected that the next rebel arrow to land among them would presage more than the minor skirmishes they’d already encountered. But the arrow that punched through his neighbor’s neck heralded a volley that found marks throughout the lines, judging by the shouts and curses and screams he heard like ghosts from the snow.

  “Weapons out!” came the frantic cry of his group’s chief, seemingly unaware of the arrow shaft poking out of his left forearm. “Forward! Forward!”

  But there was no need for them to meet the rebel enemy. They’d already come, silent as the black angel under cover of night, to finish this unholy war once and for all.

  Edere fought them with his ax, which he had only recently learned to use. He was tall and unusually large; his opponents were even less familiar with their weapons than he. It would have been easy work to dispatch them—they were in so close now that their archers didn’t dare fire for fear of hitting their own. But every time his sharp blade connected, he could feel muscle and bone parting from the force of the blow. He could hear their screams and see the blood that sprayed in the wavering light from the fires. He slipped on the now slick, steaming snow, but his opponent was already lying there, groaning and begging for mercy.

  “Back! Fall back!” came the cry up the line, and Edere realized that he was almost alone here by his campfire. The rebels rushed forward to claim the land. His erstwhile opponent—a woman, he saw now, and almost as young as his sister—lay still and moaning in her own blood. Edere stared. Her intestines spilled onto the snow like straw in a badly packed mattress. Had he done that? He realized that he might even know this woman, in another world, another life. He might have bought breadfruit from her; he might have seen her playing with her friends on the street corner or fishing off the pier. She was just another Esselan, devastated by the eruption. Just like him. He knelt, though rebel soldiers swarmed closer.

  She still breathed. Blood dribbled from her lips into the snow. She locked her gaze with his and he could see her terror and her pain so clearly he wanted to vomit. He had done this. The ax fell from his numb hand.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. Someone was yelling at him—not a rebel, one of their own, one of the medical runners braving the conflict to pick up wounded stragglers. Edere pushed him off.

  “What’s your name?” he said again to the girl, bending his head so that he might hear her better. He couldn’t save her. Nothing could. But he couldn’t let her pass beyond the gate like this, anonymous and unmourned and transient as a snowflake.

  She lowered her lids. Her breathing was hard and labored.

  “Come! There’s nothing we can do for her! You have to come!” the runner was shouting. Edere ignored him.

  “I have a sister,” he said. “Her name is Uele’a, she’s your age.”

  The girl coughed. “I don’t know. . .anyone. Like that. Everyone’s dead.”

  Everyone’s dead. For a hysterical moment, it seemed as though she meant it literally, that they were the only two left alive in all of Essel, in all of the islands.

  “I’m Edere,” he told her, dimly aware that something had happened to the frantic medical runner.

  “Leipaluka,” she said. He held her hand. The fear in her eyes receded like a tide. She smiled a little. He watched as her eyelids drooped and her breathing grew more and more shallow. He was almost sure she had died by the time one of the rebel soldiers yanked him to his feet.

  The medical runner had also been captured and Edere regretted that he had been the cause of another man’s misfortune. He was half-gray and looked unspeakably weary—Edere wondered how such an old man had taken a job ferrying wounded soldiers out of the battle. Perhaps he too had lost everyone, like Leipaluka. Or perhaps there was someone in his life he wanted to protect.

  “You couldn’t just leave like the rest?” the man whispered while the soldiers debated what to do with the two of them. “The girl was dying!”

  There seemed to be something missing from this statement. “But you stayed,” Edere said.

  The man shrugged, his fury a short-lived flame. “You were alive.” He looked up at the approaching soldiers, their faces shrouded until they were just a few feet away. “But not for long.”

  “Eliki says we’re pressing on,” the rebel soldier said. Freshly healed burns puckered one side of his face and, unlike most of his companions, he carried a real war blade and wore metal greaves that looked ancient enough to have actually been constructed for battle. “We don’t have time to bring them back as captives. Slit their throats and let’s go.”

  Edere had known he might die in this war, but he hadn’t imagined it would be quite like this. Slaughtered like a ritual sacrifice for some dark witch? He thought about struggling. He stood taller than most of these men. But his weapon lay on the ground a few feet away. They’d overpower him quickly.

  “I’m the black angel’s father,” the man beside him said.

  Everyone stared. Edere felt a hysterical giggle tickling his throat like an itch.

  But at least this did make the rebel soldier hesitate. “She’s the black angel,” he said, as though this made the impossibility clear.

  “She wasn’t always. Her name is Iolana bei’Leilani. She’s nineteen years old. She was born as a mandagah diver in the outer islands by the death shrine. She became the black angel like you became a rebel soldier. Choice and circumstance.”

  The soldier in question seemed to find this situation too bizarre to ignore. “She grew wings by choice and circumstance?” he said, smiling a little.

  The man, the black angel’s father, shrugged. “I suppose she did.”

  The soldier bent his head until he was eye to eye with the man. They stared at each other for a long moment, but eventually the soldier stood up and clapped the man on his shoulder.

  “Nice try,” he said. “But we have a war to win.”

  Edere realized that the men would kill them both at precisely the moment the scarred rebel soldier turned his back and the man holding him loosened his grip. Her name was Leipaluka, Edere thought, and drove his elbow hard into his captor’s stomach. He whirled around, grabbing the old man and yanking the adze stuck through the band of the doubled-over soldier’s belt in the same move.

  “Run!” he yelled at the old man while he kept the soldiers at bay with the adze. “Her name was Leipaluka,” he said, pointing to the body. “Remember. Someone has to remember. Tell your daughter.”

  The old man didn’t waste unnecessary words. Within his weariness Edere could see understanding. “And yours?” he said.

  Edere told him. The old man nodded, squeezed his hand and turned to sprint away. He moved fast for a gray-hair. Edere, feeling the sting of a blade connecting with his shoulder, focused on the battle. He made his way closer to Leipaluka’s body and hefted his other ax. He was wounded. He could see the blood from his shoulder dripping into the snow, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel the weariness in his limbs or the grief he knew was there at never seeing his mother or his sister again. Was Leipaluka now reunited with the ones she had lost?

  “Se maloka selama ua ola, ipa nui!” he shouted, turning the ancient prayer into a battle cry—

  “—What lies beyond the gate, I do not know!”

  Kapa paused when he heard the man’s roar. He turned around as though compelled to by an unseen spirit and so bore witness to Edere’s death. At least three others lay bleeding around him. The arm holding the ax had been hacked off. It was this—only this—that allowed the scarred soldier to pierce his heart through. If Kapa stayed he might get caught again, and so render Edere’s sacrifice meaningless. Sacrifice, Kapa thought, turning again and running, though his throat burned and his lungs ached with cold and grief. I’ve heard enough of that word for my lifetime.

  The rebels would have murdered him in cold blood to keep the battle moving forward. Those were the people his daughter had decided to su
pport. A different sort of bitterness clawed at him now, but he was finally safe behind the front lines and so allowed the immediate needs of his body to distract him. In the apothecary tent, someone draped a blanket over his shoulders and gave him a mug of warm palm wine to drink. It was weak and watered down, but it eased his shivering. He was half-soaked and covered in blood. Aside from a perfunctory question to see if any of it was his, no one noticed. There had been all too much blood in Essel of late.

  Kapa fell asleep in the tent and awoke when the first glimmerings of dawn were pushing at the cloud cover. Left to his own devices, he probably would have slept longer, but someone was insistently shaking his shoulder and so he opened his eyes.

  “Sabolu?” he said, still groggy, and so surprised to see the young stablehand here, of all places, he wondered if he might be dreaming.

  She beamed. “That’s right. Glad to see you still alive, Papa.” She called him that. Short for Black Angel Papa, but perhaps also just because she liked him. After Lana went to the rebels, Sabolu had come to their flat several times looking for her. He’d given her dinner and a few kala, when those were still worth something. She was young and bubbly and oddly full of secrets. He thought that whatever she was doing for Lana couldn’t possibly be the end of her information-gathering activities. He worried for her, but she laughed him off.

  “You should go back to the fire temple. Quickly, Sabolu. It isn’t safe here.” The medical tents were located safely east of the rebel’s activities, but given what he had seen earlier there was no telling what might happen.

  She shrugged, as though a few thousand soldiers armed with deadly weapons were of as little concern to her as an unruly horse.

  “Black angel sent me. She wanted to make sure you were alive. Said she heard something from the soldiers about them trying to kill you.”

  Kapa had to turn away. Any mention of his daughter, however offhand, tended to overwhelm him. But now, oh great Kai, how he missed Leilani. Surely she would know what to do. Lana had heard about what the soldiers had done. She’d been afraid for him, just as he’d worried about Mo’i arrows when he’d seen her flying high above the battle.

  “Well, I’m fine,” Kapa said, when he could speak again. “As you can well see. Now go back to the temple and stay there.”

  Sabolu pouted. “But what about the black angel? I promised I’d let her know.”

  “Did she say to meet her back in the rebel camp?”

  “Well, she said to send a message.”

  Kapa suppressed a sigh of relief. It was good to know Lana wasn’t that thoughtless. “Then I’ll pass the message. Go back, Sabolu. You don’t want to get caught up in this.”

  Sabolu, to his relief, finally seemed to come around to this idea. “All right, then,” she said. “I’ll see you, Papa.” She hesitated, and then lowered her voice. “I don’t think I like the smell of blood.”

  “I don’t much like it either, Sabolu,” he said, equally softly. Leilani would love this child. “And if you see the black angel later,” Later, later, so vague and useless. Sabolu had to know what that meant, but she didn’t say. “Give her this name: Leipaluka.”

  “Leipaluka? I had a dog named that once. Who’s that?”

  “A dead rebel soldier. A Mo’i soldier named Edere didn’t want her forgotten.”

  Sabolu frowned at this and he would have tried to explain—though he wondered if there was any explanation that wouldn’t confuse her more—when six new wounded soldiers were carried into the tent along with frantic message-bearers.

  “There’s a new force helping the rebels. They’ve come into the old docks by ship and are fighting their way south!”

  “We’re open on two fronts?”

  “Quickly, I need bandages!”

  Sabolu looked around, her eyes wide and suddenly afraid. Kapa stood quickly and walked her to the door.

  “Back. Now, Sabolu.”

  “I’ll see you again, right?”

  “Of course. Don’t forget to tell Lana that name.”

  “Lana?”

  Great Kai, how had he gotten so old? He remembered when his parents drowned in the storm. He remembered when Leilani’s mother had been murdered and she proposed to him at the burning. He had been as young as this little girl once. So had his daughter, free and eager and utterly ignorant of the ways of the wind.

  “The black angel,” he said. “My black angel,” and pushed Sabolu away—

  —away from the crowd chattering in such a fascinating yet indecipherable way around the medical tents and toward the armyguarded road that led back to the fire temple. The Black Angel Papa hugged Sabolu tight before she went off, which reminded her of her own papa. She hated to see him leave, to go back to that tent filled with the metal and rust and rot smell of dried blood and sick bodies. What if one of the soldiers pierced him through with those awful, great knives? Or bashed his head in with a stick? What if he caught the cold-sickness she’d seen on her way here: the blackened fingers and toes that could only be cut off? She didn’t like this nagging fear, this new worry for someone else. Her parents had died years ago. She’d learned to take care of herself. She had her own barkcloth now and a nice store of sennit braid hidden in the barn in case she needed it for an emergency. She knew the old hag’s secrets and she knew the pale one’s secrets and she knew the black angel’s secrets. She could trade them forever and get rich, rich, rich, like a chief of ancient Essela. But now that she knew Black Angel Papa, she had to wonder what might happen if she told the old bag everything the pale one planned. Or if the black angel discovered what the pale one had made Sabolu do to that jolly, fat baby. What would Black Angel Papa think if he knew that she had almost killed a baby? He’d probably hate her. She didn’t want that. And she hadn’t wanted to kill a baby either; it was just that the pale one never quite said what the bundle of feather and bone in her pocket would do once it touched the crown of the kid’s head and Sabolu hadn’t asked, now had she?

  “But she’s fine now,” Sabolu said aloud, for the hundredth time. No one else knew. She was safe. After this war was over she’d find even more secrets and sell those until she could buy a nice house on the ocean like her father had always wanted. And Papa could come and live there with her and the black angel could visit if she wanted, too. Lana. She had a name, his black angel. She thought of that other one he had given her, Leipaluka, and shook her head. Old men could be funny sometimes. Who cared about the name of some dead rebel girl? Besides, there probably wasn’t anyone alive who remembered her.

  Unless it meant something else. She paused, nearly on the threshold of the fire temple. Yes, of course, Papa had been around a dozen other people, and any of them might have overheard him. He’d probably been speaking in code. A code that she needed to tell the rebels. She’d wondered why Papa and the black angel were fighting on opposite sides, but it made sense if he were spying for her. Sabolu grinned, pleased with herself. She went around the back of the temple, through the gardens to an entrance she’d discovered years ago that led to the kitchens. She snuck here often, because it was a good place to overhear conversation and also to get warm in the heat that spilled from the great ovens. She pushed aside the vines and opened the door, but didn’t get much farther than that. There was already someone inside. Sitting down, his head on his knees. She smelled blood, but she couldn’t see it. His clothes were too dark and wet with melted snow.

  “Are you dead?” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  She shut the door. “Oh, Pano. It’s you. I heard the old bag put a guard on the wife, if you wanted to see her.”

  Pano grimaced. “So I have noticed.”

  “You’re still here.”

  “I was hoping to discover a plan.”

  “By acting dead?”

  “You’re much too clever for me, Sabolu. Do you think you could get the guard to come away? Give them orders from Makaho?”

  Sabolu rolled her eyes. “You think they’d believe me?�
�� She paused and looked at Pano more carefully. “You’re hurt?”

  “Arrow in the leg.”

  “You can give me something?”

  He seemed amused by this, which Sabolu chalked up to perversity. Pano and Eliki both were the oddest people. “I think we could arrange remuneration.”

  Sabolu had learned what that meant a few weeks ago, because Eliki liked big words and Sabolu liked any words that had to do with money. “How much?” she asked.

  “Ten loops of sennit braid and a feast on rebel territory.”

  “You think you’re gonna win?”

  Pano didn’t quite smile, but some tension left his face. “We’ve had reinforcements,” he said, the same way someone else might say, “We’ve seen the spirits.”

  “Good. I’ll be right back.”

  Sabolu didn’t try to hide or anything when she walked through the temple to the wife’s quarters. They all knew her here, and her business often took her all over the complex. The guard was from the Mo’i, though, so he eyed her suspiciously until Malie told him to let her in.

  “You have a message from Pano?” the wife said, so eagerly that her fat baby actually removed its mouth from her nipple to protest.

  Sabolu thought she was speaking mighty loud, and Malie—always sensible—apparently thought so too, because she glared.

  “I thought you two might like to see some horses,” she said.

  Sabolu took an involuntary step back when the wife stood. She didn’t want to get any closer to that kid. For all she knew, whatever spirit geas the pale one had given her would still work if she touched it again. And Pano wouldn’t like that at all. The guard trailed them while they walked at a maddeningly slow pace through the halls, though Sabolu knew that was safer. Outside, they hurried. The path between the temple and the stables had been kept clear, and Malie glared at the guard when he tried to follow them inside. Uele’a had gone, for some reason, but that was easier for her purposes anyway. No need to pretend to admire the horses. She gave Malie directions on how to find the secret entrance and handed them some bandages and liniment they used when the horses had chilblains. The wife looked like she might faint. She was a bundle of nervous energy, that wife. Sabolu didn’t understand how she had come to be at the center of so many political webs. She’d be better off in a fishing village in the outer islands.