The Burning City (Spirit Binders)

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Why do you care so much, anyway?” Nahoa said. “No one’s proposing to get rid of the fire temple.”

  “The Mo’i is selected by the great fire itself, my lady. You can hardly imagine I’d stand idly by while the rabble tries to dismantle the ancient tradition.”

  They glared at each other. How was it that his wife had spent so long in Makaho’s care, given how much they disliked each other? But he knew why. What he’d done to Nahe had so horrified her that anything would have seemed preferable.

  “I think you’re flinching, brother,” said Emea. Though lately, he thought, she did not even pretend to affect the mannerisms of his long-dead sister. He sometimes remembered the real Emea now. Her green eyes had been very kind, but she thought of him as stuck up and silly and he didn’t think she’d been wrong. He’d loved her. Great Kai, how he’d loved his sister. He’d destroyed an entire city in his grief.

  He’d ripped out a little girl’s throat.

  The ghost of the stablegirl dogged him now, as always. “I’m sorry,” he said to her. She didn’t respond. She couldn’t.

  “Did you say something, my lord?”

  Pano and Nahoa were both looking at him like they’d just noticed he was in the room. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I surrender. Tell me what plan you have for the new government and I’ll instate it as my last act. Whatever it is, I hope you at least improve on the Okikans. Another generation and the great families will declare themselves royalty.”

  Makaho stared at him in voiceless fury. Pano didn’t seem to have understood what he said. Only Nahoa registered the slightest sadness.

  “But Kohaku, what will you do? Go back to the Kulanui?”

  This seemed so absurd that he laughed. Imagine, old Bopa forced to accept his research on the outer islands six years late. “No,” he said. “I will follow my sister, I think.”

  Nahoa put her hands over her mouth. Makaho finally found her voice. “What does that mean, Mo’i?”

  But he didn’t have to answer. “He’s going to sacrifice himself,” Nahoa said. She was crying. “He’s going to throw himself in the damn volcano.”

  He almost smiled.

  Halfway up Nui’ahi, its namesake began to cry. As Ahi was a robust baby, her wails seemed louder than the wind of a high storm. Malie took the noisy bundle without complaint and started back down the mountain. Nahoa wanted to call her to come back, to let Kohaku have a chance at one last goodbye, but he just shook his head. Makaho had threatened to arrest them all when Kohaku proposed to help bind the fire spirit again. But he had coolly informed her that the news of his capitulation would be circulated to the crowd outside the moment they stepped off the ship, and did she care to have her fire temple overrun by a mob? Nahoa would never have guessed that the head nun was secretly one of those napulo kooks who thought the spirit bindings were evil, but it did make sense. Three quarters of the way to the lip, Pano started to cough and Nahoa told him to go back down. He tried to refuse, and she realized that he was afraid for her safety.

  “Kohaku won’t do anything,” she shouted. No matter what else had happened between them, she’d always been very sure of his love. And that, she supposed, was why she’d felt like sobbing every time she looked at him. He had been her first love. She couldn’t forget that or dismiss it, no matter what he had become.

  Pano touched her shoulder before he left. The last few yards to the lip were slippery with brittle pumice stone that seemed to crumble wherever she put her feet. Kohaku pulled her up when she fell, but otherwise he stared at the lip of the volcano like he was meeting his lover. By the time they reached the top, the smoke made it difficult to see him, so she held his hand. She looked inside, just to say she had, but she could only make out a hint of a perfectly smooth orange surface, like a giant piece of glass. That was it? She’d at least expected some bubbles, like a stew. Maybe a hiss and scream of shearing rock.

  “The fire shrine is more exciting than this,” Nahoa said before she remembered why she was here, and when she had last seen the fire shrine, and all the million choices that led her to this place. Kohaku looked back at her and smiled.

  “Do you regret it?” he asked.

  “Regret. . .” Regret what? She had Ahi. Perhaps in another time, another way, they could have kept their happiness.

  “No,” she said.

  She started to cough and Kohaku stepped away from her. He looked, not at the quiescent pool of magma, but up into the dense haze of smoke.

  “You were never real,” he said to no one. He laughed bitterly. “I offer myself as a sacrifice. A binding for my unbinding of the great fire.”

  He stepped off the edge. Nahoa screamed his name. She couldn’t see him through the smoke; it was as if he’d never existed. She hadn’t even said goodbye.

  The house appeared as empty as ever, but now Lana guessed why. She didn’t immediately recite the geas that would let her see the two for whom she’d spent the past three months searching. Instead, she looked around the tiny house, so well loved that Akua had kept it countless centuries after the deaths of Tulo and Parech. She imagined that if she checked, she’d find notes left by a father to his son, by a man to the woman with whom he’d shared so much and yet never quite enough. Had he ever forgiven her? To think that Aoi had turned Parech, of all people, into a guardian. Could any solution have been more against his nature?

  “What were you thinking, Aoi?” she whispered, but no one responded.

  Lana understood many things now. She had so much knowledge she ached with it. Far from wanting to crack the death’s binding, as Lana had once suspected, Akua herself had bound the death a millennia ago. But now it was breaking free. She had known this for years. Decades, even. She’d devised a plan so ingenious it had taken Lana all the hours of her flight back from the atolls to decipher it, even though she’d been a central part of the plan for most of her life.

  Akua had found a girl powerful enough to be her surrogate, but young and malleable enough to be kept ignorant of her role and the more arcane ways of geas. She had trained her to learn geas by heart, and yet conspicuously had not taught her the bases upon which they were formed. She had done this not to keep her powerless, but to make her as much like the Aoi of the black book as possible. In those days, no one knew much about the spirits, still less about bindings. Akua had needed to trust that Lana would be clever enough when the time came, but not so clever that she learned the truth too early. And the moment when the plan had crystallized, when Lana had agreed to the horrifying scheme without even knowing? The night she spent in Akua’s death shrine, accepting the death sacrifices of hundreds of matched pendants. That night she had accepted the weight of Akua’s lifetime of desperate measures as her own. She had bound herself inextricably into Akua’s plan, and she should have known better. Ino had tried to stop her, she remembered. He had known what Akua was doing, even if he was geas-bound not to say.

  Akua had sacrificed others to keep herself alive, because life was the requirement of the binding. But those deaths must have paradoxically strengthened the death against her. Until now, when it finally threatened to break free. Now those deaths were Lana’s, and their expiation her responsibility. If she did not sacrifice herself on the altar of Akua’s binding, she would be responsible for letting the death spirit go free.

  But if Lana died, then so would her mother.

  Lana had disturbed Akua’s plans. She had learned something she was not supposed to know, and had prevented something she should have let happen. She had saved her mother’s life with an ancient geas, and so invoked the death spirit earlier and in an entirely different manner than Akua had planned. And because Lana had tied Leilani’s fate so inexorably with her own, Akua had kidnapped her mother. Lana could only assume that Akua thought her so depraved that she’d consider allowing the deaths of tens of thousands to save her own mother’s life.

  Not so long ago, Akua might have been right. Now, she’d make the hard choice if she had to. But that wouldn’t
stop her from using however much time she had left to think of any geas that might save her mother. But how much time remained in Akua’s original binding?

  That was the question she still could not answer. She doubted Akua could, either. The terms of her binding with the death obviously prohibited her from helping Lana in any way.

  It was time. She took the flute from her pocket, Aoi’s arm bone flute, and played a brief tune. The death, so invited over the threshold, gazed at her. It was her familiar death, not the terrifying alldeath of the cave. And yet it looked different. So translucent and wispy as to be almost a shadow.

  “How are you finding knowledge, Lana?” it asked.

  “It’s as you said. Death, what’s happened to you?”

  “I am being subsumed. The godhead tasks me with excess emotion. We want me dissolved and made again, different and unalloyed.”

  Dissolved and made again. “Is that. . .you’re dying?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I’m not human.”

  Which was not, Lana realized much later, an answer. “I must bind you, death. One last time.”

  It inclined its head and she recited, with that perfect memory Akua had insisted she develop, the geas Aoi had first made to escape the Maaram army. “As you are out of the world’s sight, so make me. Let me travel in the spirit world for a time, so I am invisible to the real one.”

  The world glowed, familiar in its shape and terrifying in its composition. Spirits were tied to the foundations, but the death dissolved before her, its mask lingering like a final farewell.

  There were three people here, not just two.

  “Kai?” she said. He was so pale, it seemed his skin had turned to water. His eyes held an ocean. He turned to her, but she couldn’t read his face. She had never seen him look so inhuman, so much like the sprites he bound. She realized that this must be how Akua had captured him.

  Akua. Not Makaho.

  “You’re working with the old nun?” Lana said. “She thinks you’re napulo?”

  Akua smiled. “I’m aware of the irony. It’s good to see you, Lana.”

  But the one she truly sought stood behind Akua. “Mama,” Lana said, and then forgot her words altogether.

  “I’ve missed you,” Leilani said.

  She sounded so calm. She looked well. It surprised Lana. She hadn’t expected Akua to take good care of her mother.

  “You’ll let them go,” Lana said. “Now.”

  Akua frowned, not with anger so much as sadness. “I thought you understood this better by now. I can’t let your mother leave. You have to know that.”

  Lana grit her teeth, nearly overwhelmed by the nearness of her mother and the seemingly unstoppable strength of Akua’s will. “I do not care,” she said. “I will take my mother back. I will keep her safe.”

  “Do you realize what’s at stake, Lana? Truly? There’s a reason I need your mother. One that goes beyond our own dispute.”

  Lana took a step closer to Akua. She’d forgotten how much taller the other woman stood—it had always intimidated her, but at least now she was too angry to care.

  “I will keep my mother safe first. Then I will deal with whatever obligations I have because of your cursed geas.”

  “You agreed to it, Lana.”

  “And I should have known better.”

  “I let Ino warn you.”

  Lana paused, looking past Akua and her mother and her lover, and imagined the house as it had been when it was built. She imagined Akua as she had been, young and joyous and in love.

  “He said it would twist you,” Lana said.

  Akua just smiled. It reminded Lana of Parech. “He was wise, for a barbarian.”

  “And Tulo?”

  “She stayed with Parech, though she hated the death. We saw each other sometimes. It. . .he was wise, for a barbarian. Ileopo stayed with me in the death shrine. His descendants still serve there.” She said this with perfect steadiness, and yet Lana still heard an ancient pain. How hard must grief grow, aged a thousand years?

  “How much longer before your binding runs out, Akua? How much longer do I have?”

  She shook her head. “If you’ve deduced that much, you must know I can’t tell you.”

  “Yes,” Lana said.

  “You’ve done well.”

  “Only because you forced me.”

  “Yes,” Akua said.

  With a speed she guessed might be her only advantage, she whipped the small knife from her belt and held its sharp edge at Akua’s throat.

  “Lana!” That was Kai. Her mother only let out a strangled gasp. They did not move—they were bound, she was not.

  Akua regarded her with a coolness that reminded Lana of Eliki, but only in how much farther Akua had traveled down that path of ruthless desperation.

  “Will you kill me?” Akua asked.

  “Release my mother.”

  “You know I will not.”

  “Release my mother, you bloody witch!”

  Akua took a sudden, hitching breath. Her throat touched the sharp blade, releasing a thin line of crimson.

  “Lana…Lana, don’t you think I would end this if I could?”

  Lana had to see the saltwater beading the polished metal blade before she realized they were not her own tears.

  “Akua…” Lana’s hand shook. If Akua pushed at her right now, she would fall to the floor like a solstice doll. Neither of them moved.

  “Can’t you trust me? Just this once?”

  “Isn’t that what you told Parech?”

  And Akua leaned forward, pressing her neck into the blade with the grace of a bird diving for fish. She muttered a geas even as the blood dribbled down her neck and mixed with her tears. Several things happened at once, but all Lana understood at the time was how thoroughly she had been played, how great an Ana she had set herself against.

  Kai stumbled forward. With the binding released, his body reverted to its normal, mostly human state. Her mother caught her up in a tight embrace and whispered, “There’s so little time, Lana. You must hurry.” All the while, Akua stared at them all, her neck bleeding and her eyes still unaccountably wet.

  Lana felt Kai’s hand on her back, smelled her mother’s hair by her cheek, but she only had eyes for Akua. Everything had gone so wrong. She had come to rescue her mother, and now she had nothing left but Akua’s struggle. Her mother’s arms seemed to be fading, even as they pulled her closer. She knew that Akua was sending her back, and that a geas laid by this woman would be impossible for Lana to overcome.

  “Where did you get your name?” Lana asked, as the room wavered. She knew almost everything about how Aoi had become Akua. Everything but this.

  To her surprise, Akua looked away. “I heard it,” she said very softly. “In those moments right after. I heard the name and I knew.”

  “Aoi is dead,” Lana said, the same involuntary whisper that she’d uttered in the vision of the cave.

  Her mother vanished, and Akua with her. Lana fell to her knees on the floor of the mundane, abandoned house that love had built and her tears seemed to scorch her face.

  Eventually, she grew aware of Kai, his arms around her shoulders, his lips in her hair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I was wondering when you’d come,” Kai said.

  “I had to take a detour with the death spirit.”

  “Don’t you always?”

  She looked up at him. “If I have to die,” she said, “then let me, Kai. Some things are worse than death.”

  And Kai promised, though he could not have known what she’d seen.

  Leilani watched her daughter and her daughter’s lover vanish from the house. She wanted to cry for what still might happen to them, but Leilani never cried. She missed Kapa. Great Kai, she missed him. To know he was alive and yet still so far away. Would any of them survive this great game of Akua’s? Leilani knew why Akua couldn’t let her go. However Lana ha
d bound their fates together, Akua meant to undo it. But the powerfully complicated geas had been trickier than she expected. It seemed there were things that even a great Ana like Akua didn’t know.

  “If she finds a way to get me before you unravel her binding, what will happen?” Leilani asked.

  Akua was staring at the walls again. “You know you can tell her nothing of what I say to you, right? If you break the binding now, everything is lost.”

  “I know,” Leilani said impatiently. “You’ve said so enough. Though my daughter is a genius to have learned as much as she has.”

  Now Akua smiled, though she did not look at her. “That’s certainly true. I’d never have picked her if she wasn’t.”

  “I think Lana would call that a compliment she could do without.”

  “She would, at that. If I can’t unravel the binding, she may die before she finishes, and you with her. A geas like that only plays to the death’s strengths in this fight.”

  Carefully, Leilani voiced the option that she knew Akua must have considered. “You could kill me,” she said. “It would solve the problem.”

  Akua turned to her slowly. “It would solve the problem.”

  “But you won’t do it. Why? You tried to once before.”

  “I didn’t know you then.”

  “That makes it okay?”

  Akua smiled. After these many months, Leilani knew it meant she was thinking about the past. And her past, as Akua had gradually revealed, spanned a great many more years anyone else’s. “No,” she said. “It just makes it acceptable to me.”

  “Were Parech and Tulo the other ones who lived in this house?”

  “Ever perceptive, Lei.”

  “How else would I get through the day?”

  They smiled at each other, wearied and knowing. “Parech stole Tulo’s spirit sight,” Akua said. “Or thought he did. And after, when she asked him how he could have done such a cruel thing, he told her he’d never do it now. It’s just that she was a stranger, and there was too much suffering in the world for him to care for those he didn’t know.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have believed him.”