Racing the Dark (32 page)

Lana thought she heard a clicking sound and she looked up frantically for the spider, but it had disappeared. She only saw its massive web, covering half the ceiling. She shuddered. She didn't want to think about where the spider could be.

"So what brings you here, my dear? I haven't had a real visitor for ... why, it must be these past thirty years. And you look like you have a problem a bit larger than normal." She gestured toward the death, waiting beyond the temple boundaries, its mask at its most unreadable.

Lana's eyes trailed to the woman's stick, which had a design vaguely reminiscent of a spider carved into its head. This woman radiated a subtle power, and Lana wondered if she could possibly help her.

"I need help ... to stay alive," Lana said slowly, looking into the woman's surprisingly sharp black eyes. "I don't know how much longer I can do it on my own. It's not just my own life I'm guarding. I have to save my mother."

"I suspected as much." The old woman's voice suddenly sounded far less crotchety. "But it's been many, many years since I even heard of such a geas. You're a young girl. You must have trained with someone who knew the old ways. Yes, someone ..." The woman gave her an appraising stare and then shuffled to the back of the temple, where she opened a rough-hewn wooden cupboard. After a moment's deliberation, she removed a long, narrow bottle made of glass with a cork stopper and walked back to where Lana was sitting.

"You should make a supplication directly to the wind spirit," she said, sitting down with a creak of bones. "It hasn't been done in five hundred years, but you don't look to me like you have better options. Besides, I think it wants to see you.

The woman winked and bit into the cork.

"It ... wants to see me?" Lana asked, suddenly nervous again. How could the wind spirit even know who she was?

"Just a hunch," said the woman indistinctly. After a moment's more of wrestling with it, her remarkably strong teeth managed to yank out the cork. Wind rushed out of the bottle with a sound like a mournful lament, howling briefly around the room before leaving through the open sides.

The old woman sighed wistfully. "I really did like that one. I was keeping it for a special occasion. Ah well. You can't keep them bottled up forever. So, do you agree?"

The change of subject was so abrupt it took Lana a few moments to even understand what she was asking. "Well ... how do I bind that when I make the pilgrimage?" Lana asked, gesturing toward the death spirit.

"Oh, don't worry. So long as you're on the pilgrimage, you're under the jurisdiction of the wind spirit. Only the spirit itself will have the power to kill you."

Lana hoped that was reassuring. "I'll go, I guess. I don't really know what else to do."

The woman smiled briefly at her, and then licked her finger to test the wind. "Just a light breeze," she muttered to herself. "Iolana, do you know how to call a wind?"

Lana's breathing grew shallow. How did the woman know her name? After a moment she shook her head silently.

"Sailors used to do it, back before the wind spirit broke free. Now only a few of us can. Those chosen by the wind. But I think you could learn, if you wanted to."

"How?" Lana asked. It was almost surprising how, after everything, her natural curiosity could still be piqued. But then, Akua had always taught her that even the most minor knowledge was its own kind of power. And Lana knew she was in too deep to refuse whatever help was offered.

"Have you ever heard the way the wind howls at night? The way it rattles doors and shrieks and moans? The wind is a melancholy, powerful spirit. No geas can call it, though they can bind it. Call ing it is a different sort of skill-to call the wind, you must feel its melancholy in your soul and match it."

"With the flute?" she asked, after a moment's thought.

The woman's face broke out in a bright grin, revealing a full set of teeth. "That would be brilliant. More appropriate than you know. Yes, try it now, with the flute. If you call a wind, I'll bottle it."

Lana sat with the flute poised above her lips for a long time as she tried to get the image of what she wanted to convey just right in her head. The woman had told her to match the wind's melancholy, not simply imitate it. When she finally thought she was ready, she began to play. The notes dipped and swirled like no other melody she had ever played-in fact, they didn't sound very much like a melody at all, and yet they were somehow still musically cohesive. She did her best to echo the wind's melancholy, playing in its silent and violent places alike until she had created something both sad and powerful. She felt the wind enter the temple, softly at first, and then more strongly, until it seemed to be playing with her. It howled past her ears with a shriek that was almost joyous. She played until the wind was merely another whisper in her ear, and then the woman had corked the bottle.

The woman was staring at her with a strange, almost shocked expression. "You may just survive. You're followed by more than you know, and yet ... you may just survive."

Lana's smile was half-derisive, half-sincere. "At least I'm a quick study."

The woman nodded, bemused, and handed Lana the slim glass bottle. It looked empty, but she could feel tremors against the fingers that gripped it. "Keep this with you at all times. Go to the wind island, and get the tribespeople there to take you to the ruins on the mesa. Uncork the bottle. The spirit will come to you."

Lana took the bottle from the woman. "I understand enough to know I don't know a thing," Lana said, impulsively, as she slid the bottle inside her pack. The top stuck out. "But ... I'm grateful for this."

"A thousand drips will fill a bucket," she said, which Lana supposed was better comfort than none. She then rose with a speed Lana thought should be impossible for a woman her age. "You must leave now. It's time I had my dinner and you should leave this hill by sundown."

Lana walked back to the porch. "But wait," she said just as she put her foot back on the first step. "Who are you?"

The woman smiled. "Caretaker of this humble temple, servant to the wind spirit, and ... an acquaintance of a mutual friend. Now go."

The dismissal had no sting to it. Lana nodded and began climbing back down the tree. She froze a few steps down when she thought she heard the unmistakable cry of a bird in its death throes. A sharp clicking, like that of a bird-eating spider, followed it. Lana shivered and climbed down the rest of the tree as quickly as she could.

The few traders at the outpost looked shocked when she staggered back in fifteen days later, covered with mud and considerably thinner than she had been a month earlier. They told her that a ship wouldn't be arriving for another three days, and Lana, so exhausted her teeth hurt, decided she could risk staying in town and relying upon the kindness of a medicine trader's wife who had been among the ones to witness her arrival in the settlement. She was a thin woman, baked brown by the sun and a difficult life. Her eyebrows were thin blond lines across her forehead, and her hair was light blond streaked with white. She could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty-the salty air and the sun out here had a way of preserving people. She opened the door of a tidy two-room house made of birch wood. The logs had been dried and sealed carefully, but Lana guessed that they couldn't have been more than two years old. In fact, most of the houses in the traders' village looked relatively new.

The woman paused in the entrance and took off her shoes. "It's all the rain," she said, half apologetically. "It gets so you don't know what you're bringing in. I hope you don't mind."

Her Essel accent made Lana wonder what had brought her to this isolated place. "Don't worry," she said. She bent down to untie the laces of her sandals and tried to ignore the sudden sharp pain when she reopened a cut on her back. She stood up and looked behind her to make sure that the death hadn't crossed the threshold. It waited like a sentinel outside the door, mask expressionless. That had been her first geas-it couldn't cross the threshold of a place that Lana herself had been invited into. Even though it was also bound by her pilgrimage, the thought of it looking into this woman's house made her nervous.

"Can I shut the door?" Lana asked, carefully polite.

"Oh, of course." The woman opened the larder and began pulling out some food while Lana closed the door. It would be good to spend a few days without the death as her constant companion.

"Why don't you go and wash up? We don't have much-just a pump and a bucket outside, but I thought you might want to get rid of all that grime ..."

Lana smiled ruefully at the slightly appalled look in the woman's eyes. She could only imagine how grubby she must look. It had been months since she had last seen her own reflection in something clearer than a muddy puddle. "I would love that," she said.

The water was lukewarm and the pump squeaked in a way that made the space between her shoulder blades shiver, but she spent more than half an hour scrubbing herself before she felt clean. After she had dumped the last bucket over her head, she sat silently on the rough wooden floor of the bathing room. Water dripped between the slats of the fresh timber and disappeared into the ground below. Nearby, a monkey let out a great bellow and birds shrieked in response. It was hard to forget how much closer-and how much stronger-the forest was than this spare enclave.

The whole time she had been evading the death, she had hardly even thought of bathing, so how could something so simple and mundane make her feel so bereft? It was as though all of the strain and weariness of the past two months-months when she'd had no time to think of anything but how to survive till the next morning-had finally caught up to her. And if two months had taken her so close to her limit, she didn't know how she could even survive the year. She felt her eyes well with tears. She didn't regret her decision to save her mother, but she had never felt so desperately helpless before. She couldn't stay alive on her own much longer, and she hated how useless that made her feel. The wind spirit had to help her. If it didn't ...

Lana shook her head firmly and drew another bucket of water. She splashed her face and then dumped the rest of it over her head. When she was sure that the tears had stopped, she opened the door. Next to a towel, the woman had replaced Lana's mud-caked clothes with clean ones. The sober gray pants were too long and the shirt came all the way down to her mid-calves, but she had never appreciated such soft, clean cloth more in her life. She had nearly forgotten what it felt like not to be wet.

When she walked back inside the house, the woman clapped her hands in approval. "What an improvement!" she said. "Still too thin, but at least not as desperate as when you staggered in. I can't imagine what you were thinking, tramping off into the forest to see the wind temple. We all thought you must have died. Here, sit down."

She ushered Lana to a table like the one her family had used back on her island-low to the ground, surrounded by legless chairs with cushions. The woman had set out what looked like leftovers from the previous day's meal-cold tea and fermented disks of pan bread with a spicy, thick bean soup. Lana practically fell on the food, with only a last shred of manners preventing her from stuffing most of the bread in her mouth at once.

"Thank you so much," Lana said, when she had finished everything. "I don't deserve your kindness, but thank you."

The woman smiled, which made her look younger. "I have a daughter about your age. I don't get to see her much ... not since Tapamahe moved out here to make his fortune. It's nice to have someone else to feed in the house. Especially since it looks like you need it."

Lana leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. The pale beams reflected light from the open window.

"How long have you been here?" Lana asked. "The house looks new.

"We moved here from Essel about five years ago, but we've had to rebuild the house twice since then."

Lana stared at her, shocked. "Twice? What on earth happened? Fire?"

She shook her head. "It's the winds. The old timers say that the Kalakoas have been plagued by them ever since the wind spirit broke free. I don't know about that, but every rainy season the sea starts to swell and huge storms rip right through here. You've never felt anything like it-a wind that can just destroy everything in its path. I wept so hard the first time it tore down my house. But you just learn to clear out quickly and be grateful for your life. The first year we came here, the winds were so horrible that we actually sent ... well, I mean ..."

The woman, who had seemed lost in her story, looked abruptly embarrassed.

"You actually sent what?"

The woman looked around and then leaned forward over the table. "Well, I suppose it won't hurt to tell you. You're leaving in a few days, after all." She spoke in an almost-whisper, like she was afraid of someone overhearing. "We sent the spirit a sacrifice. It was horrible ... everyone over sixteen had to put their name in the lottery. We picked this other trader's wife, she had just recovered from the forest sickness. They tied her up and took her into the forest and came back twenty days later without her. They said they had given her to the spider crone up in the wind temple. I really wanted to leave after that, but Tapamahe said we should stay. The storms got better for the next few years, but her husband ... I swear he died of a broken heart. He stopped eating, sleeping, talking ... and one day he just wandered off into the forest and never came back. It's this place, you know." She looked through the window briefly and held her shoulders as though she was cold. "It sucks everything out of you if you stay too long. It sucks away your life."

Lana felt sick to her stomach. That poor woman ... she couldn't have been a willing sacrifice. Did these people know how cheaply they had sold one of their own? For a few paltry seasons of mildly better weather? But maybe in this hard place they felt it was worth it.

"Anyway," the woman said, "that's why we were so surprised when you came back. They said the last time someone came back alive from visiting the spider crone was about a hundred years ago."