The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (21 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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“Two of our own dead, three more shot with his arrows.”
“The civilians?”
“I’m not sure, Eliki. It was dark. At least twenty bodies before we got them through.” He seemed anguished.
“How much food did they bring?” Eliki’s tone hadn’t changed. Well, she certainly had the constitution for sustained violence.
“They’d raided what was left of the stores. Enough for at least two weeks.”
Eliki nodded once and gathered up the loose sheets of paper. “This goes to the press immediately, Tope,” she said, handing it to the soldier. He nodded and left. Eliki and Pano stared at each other for an almost interminable moment. Lana held her hands to the fire, forgotten and confused. What was the history between these two? Why did it seem as though they were having a conversation without speaking a word?
“This can’t go on, Pano,” she said softly. “We will lose this in a month, maybe two.”
He shook his head with uncharacteristic violence and balled his left hand into a fist. “The people have already suffered—”
“And they will suffer more before One-hand is through with them! We need that port, Pano. You know that.”
“He has bows.”
Eliki drew herself up, so that in the low light her pale skin and blond hair seemed to glow like that of an angry spirit. “And we have the heart of the people. Wait until they read what One-hand has done to them, Pano. We can reach the old docks, even without arrows.”
The old docks were the ancient ship port in the lesser bay at the top of the sixth district. Rebel territory ended at the northern border of the first district. Perhaps they could smuggle some shipments through, but how did they hope to control it? Lana gasped when her clouded mind finally made sense of their subtext. Eliki meant to conquer the sixth district with arms, and use Lana as a rallying point from which to do it.
“I never said you could use me to start a war!” The two of them turned to the fire, so startled she realized they both must have forgotten her presence.
“You agreed to help our cause,” Eliki said, her voice shot through with venom. “We’re in rebellion against a tyrannical government. How did you think we would use you? To weed the garden?”
Pano was slightly more diplomatic. “We’ve already fought with the Mo’i’s forces, you know that, Lana.
If
we have to fight for the docks,” he said, shooting a glance at Eliki, “we’ll do everything we can to minimize the damage.”
Lana wrapped her arms around her knees against her sudden shivering. Pano was right. She’d known this wary alliance with the rebels would involve some violence. But a full-blown civil war?
Still, Pano had told her of the mysterious house where Makaho had sent supplies and two mandagah jewels. He had access to dozens of people and institutions across this city that could help her find Akua and her mother. Was she willing to give that advantage up for an increasingly abstract principle? So that she could stay on the sidelines in a war that was almost certain to happen anyway? Surely if she had to choose a side, it was better to be here with the rebels than with Kohaku, who had already done so much damage. She wished that Kai were with her. He would be able to navigate this morass better than she. Sometimes she felt that her love for her mother was the only thing keeping her from sinking entirely.
“The longer you continue fighting, the greater the chance that the spirits will break free and take away all of our choices. You know that, right?”
Put so starkly, this seemed to startle Eliki. But Pano merely shrugged in that quiet way of his and Lana thought that he had spent much time dreading precisely that. “If we let One-hand win, after all he’s done, because of the threat of the spirits—we may have imprisoned them, but we would still become their slaves.”
Lana closed her eyes. She was exhausted and her back hurt. She would need to leave tomorrow and search out that house in the seventh district. She would need to find her mother and find Akua and bind the death. She was a black angel. She was the witness to the start of the first war in five hundred years. Kai could hardly bear to look her in the eye.
She did not notice when she slipped into sleep, or when Pano draped a blanket over her shoulders. Something roused her when the moon had set and the only light came from the embers of the dying fire. She saw him as a gray shadow, at first—his hair a mix of black and glowing orange. He had been staring at her, though she couldn’t see his face or read his expression. She had to speak to him. It would be easier this way—deep in this twilight unreality, his face hidden in shadow. So she couldn’t see his contempt or indifference.
“I know what I did to Pua was wrong,” she said softly. “I don’t think I’m a good person anymore. Maybe I never was. Maybe most people aren’t, Kai, and their lives don’t force them to realize it. I’m selfish and I care about some people’s suffering more than others and I know all this, I just can’t change it. I know. . .” Her voice caught. He still hadn’t moved. “Won’t you please say something? Say you don’t hate me?”
Kai was still for several painful moments and then moved jerkily, like a doll brought to life. He lowered his head, shook it, and then knelt before her. His eyes were black and absorbed the dim firelight like a sponge. She felt the urge to caress his cheek and stopped herself.
“I don’t hate you. You know that.”
“But you don’t love me?”
“Would I be here if I didn’t, keika?”
“Maybe you’re worried about me having sex with someone else. Maybe you’ve decided you need an heir so we can be rid of each other, maybe—”
He leaned forward and kissed her. She held still, surprised at first. Then what felt like a lifetime of desire crashed through her and she was a raft loosed upon it. She forgot her terror at losing him, the gnawing guilt that had prompted her confession, her mother, Akua, war, death. She forgot the earth had exploded and she’d become a black angel and that she’d killed the aunt of the man she loved for the sake of her mother. There was only this room, this fire, this half-charred floor. His hands in her hair, and his lips, and then his tongue in her mouth. A passion she’d all but forgotten she could feel.
 
The soldier cried when the news came back to the Mo’i’s house that the black angel still lived. And was now an agent of the rebels, no less. “S-someone pushed her, your honor,” the man said, his voice cracking on the honorific. “I couldn’t get a clear shot. . .please, I have a family—”
“Who were the ones with her?” Kohaku interrupted, with a most uncharacteristic mildness.
“Who?” the soldier said, startled into coherence.
“Yes, who? Who does the city have to credit for saving the black angel’s life? For allowing her to help the rebels with this?” He lifted the flimsy paper of the rebel pamphlet and let it flutter gently to the floor.
The soldier knelt so quickly that Kohaku thought he must have bruised his kneecaps. “Please your honor,” he said again, “I have—”
“Who?” repeated the Mo’i.
And now the soldier appeared to grasp that his frightened babbling might be giving the Mo’i far greater cause to be displeased than his failed assassination attempt. “I don’t know, sir. It was dark. There was a woman. In a hood. That’s the one who pushed the black angel. And a man. That’s the one who chased me away.”
“A man. Perhaps you noticed what this man looked like?”
The soldier blinked, but, to Kohaku’s relief, refrained from begging for his life again. “A bit taller than me. Dark hair, graying. His clothes were common and worn. A laborer of some kind.”
Kohaku considered this. “Yet, I wonder what sort of common laborer would be on speaking terms with the black angel? Or daring enough to chase down a provincial soldier?”
Said provincial soldier opened his mouth and then closed it, belatedly recognizing both a rhetorical statement and a trap. It was just as well. Kohaku had long grown tired of the more brutal necessities of this job. What had started with Nahe had never truly seemed to end. The spirit of his murdered sister always spurred him on.
“Did you make out the man’s face?” he asked the soldier, finally. “Well enough for someone else to draw it?”
The soldier, having finally decided he was unlikely to be killed or tortured, gave a shaky nod. “I believe so.”
“Good. Consult with your commander for the details. I want a recognizable drawing by the end of the day.”
The soldier stood. Kohaku looked back down at the sprawl of papers littering his desk. Maps, mostly. Areas of the city decimated by fires, streets rendered inaccessible by lava flows, neighborhoods full of people sickened due to contaminated water supply. Death and destruction everywhere. Why, then, would even his sister’s relentless spirit desire even more?
“And the black angel? I mean, should I try again?”
Kohaku looked up, and something in his expression made the soldier take an involuntary backward step. “I’m sorry I—”
“No,” Kohaku said, confused and unhappy with the sensation. “No, you’re right to ask, and no, please refrain for now. The rebels have her. We’ll gain no more benefit from trying to kill her.”
Not after she’s already accused me in public
. “Let’s see if we can’t devise a more useful strategy. Killing is very wasteful.”
A pained smile froze on the soldier’s face as he bowed and exited. Wasteful, indeed.
Kohaku suspected that the man the soldier had seen was one of the leaders of the rebel movement. If he could get a good enough likeness, this misadventure with Lana might bear some fruit after all. The thought, innocuous enough, brought back the same rush of sick dread he had felt ever since he gave the order to have her assassinated.
“You can’t afford to let her live,” said his sister—or at least, the fire spirit’s tormented representation of her.
Kohaku had not seen her in several days, but he was unsurprised at the timing of this visit. He’d long ago resigned himself to the knowledge that she would never leave him. He had destroyed this city for the sake of his love and thirst for revenge—and yes, not least for power. He deserved to be haunted by the ghost of his dead and beloved sister.
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.

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