The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (25 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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At first she thought to memorize the important parts, but she quickly realized that was impossible. She had a good spatial memory from her years of sailing and tying rigging, but it would take a genius to be able to recall all the measurements on these plans. And if she got it wrong, it wouldn’t be of any help to them at all. She flipped through the pile. It appeared that they were copies of each other, but it only made sense that the craftsmen would need multiple plans if they were to fashion these in such a short time. Well, there was only one thing she could do. Saying a small prayer, Nahoa pulled one of the sheets from the middle of the pile, folded it up, and tucked it up the sleeve of her shirt. With any luck, Makaho would assume that Kohaku had given her one fewer than usual. Clerical errors like that were sure to be common. She thought she heard the sound of approaching footsteps in the hall outside, so she ran back to the window and rolled awkwardly onto the ledge. Before the door could open she dropped into the mulch and bushes and waited. Sixty long seconds and she started walking back around to the western entrance.
A long walk. That’s all she had taken. There was no reason for anyone to suspect otherwise.
 
There had been some sort of battle. Not at Sea Street—that stretch of the border was too well defended—but further north near the sixth district, where the rebels had been pierced through with arrows while they smoked and cast bones to pass the time. Lana heard the shouts and screams from the next street over, and she walked alone toward the blackened heaps of volcanic slag that marked the border. Normally there was some commerce between the rebels and those who lived along their edge. Now, as Lana approached the Sea Street barrier, all she could see were tightly shuttered windows and the scuffling blur of someone rushing desperately to safety. The death accompanied her now, which she noted with grim curiosity. How many had died this time? How many would die if Eliki succeeded in her goal to gain more territory to the north and reach the old docks?
Lana approached the line slowly, with her hands up and her wings clearly visible. The rebels had no bows, but she didn’t want to take a chance. They recognized her immediately and two rebel soldiers flanked her as she scrambled through their fortifications. Inside, all was chaos. She stood for a helpless moment, staring at the men and a few women being carried on crudely woven reed mats to the healer’s building. She recognized the feather-fletched hafts of wood that sprouted from their bodies like some fearsome flower. Some of them screamed and others were eerily silent, but her body recalled the pain and she shivered. She wondered if there was something she could do, some sort of sacrifice that might save some of their lives. But the only item of use was the smooth haft of hollowed and polished bone in her pocket—Akua’s arm bone flute. She hadn’t used it in months, not since she first came here. She looked at the death beside her, holding itself with an uncanny stillness. She could sense its anticipation at the upcoming glut of souls. She would be doing those soldiers no favors by going among them with a death avatar, and even fewer by trying to heal their wounds with a geas tied to the same witch who had kidnapped her mother.
“How many will die?” she asked it, turning away from the bustle and walking toward the shadows.
“I’m not a soothsayer,” it said.
She gave it a wry smile. “Fine. But you can tell who comes closest to the gate.”
“All of you,” it said, its voice as chillingly impassive as when they’d first met. “Whichever of you goes through, it’s a difference of inches, not miles.”
The meeting room was unguarded and empty. The last few weeks had been a constant struggle in the rebel camp. The Mo’i had restricted the flow of resources into the first district as best he could, starving the people inside in order to defeat them. And a rough sketch of Pano—imperfect, but still recognizable—had been circulating around the city, making it difficult for him to go anywhere anonymously. Lana had tried to keep out of their way, letting Kai help them when he would and otherwise searching out a geas that might find her mother. She’d tried the first shrine Sabolu had suggested, but none of the people there would even admit to being napulo, let alone seeing Akua.
She wondered where Kai was, but it wasn’t hard to deduce Eliki and Pano’s whereabouts. She sat on the steps outside, because the air was wet and not too cold. The rebels scurrying back and forth, living and dying, might as well have been actors on a stage. She felt distanced from them, like all those years ago when her best friend Kali had drowned in the floods. She had seen her entire island gather for Kali’s funeral, but she had hardly felt a thing. That was why they had left. That was why Leilani had taken a job as a waitress and Lana had worked the vats in a laundry. She had renounced her family’s legacy. Born to be a diver, she had instead become apprenticed to a witch. Like Ino had always said—Lana had been born for water, but taken by death.
She had escaped it for now, but one day she would have nowhere left to run.
“But not too soon,” she muttered to herself. Not before she could save her mother.
She wasn’t aware of having made the decision, but she found the arm bone flute in her palm and her mind was racing for the shape of the geas she could cast. She had perhaps been going about this the wrong way. The flute was the strongest connection she had to her former teacher. She had avoided it out of fear, but maybe the lesson of the black book and its strange, foreign story of Aoi, Tulo, and Parech was that she had to be braver. She had to risk more. Perhaps the spirits responded to timid geas with timid boons. After all, how else could Akua have made such a powerful object as the flute without an equally powerful sacrifice?
Akua had never taught her the base postulates that gave power to spirit bindings. She had never explained to Lana the true nature of the powers they manipulated. Kai had taught her that, in the long idyllic months in his water shrine. But perhaps Akua had given her a gift of sorts, after all—since Lana was not tied down to any classical education on the nature of geas, she was freer than most apprentice witches to imagine. Just like Aoi, she thought.
She needed to find Akua. But more than that, she needed to understand Akua. Her former teacher was vastly more skilled than Lana could hope to be. Her geas were subtle and powerful. It was ludicrous to imagine that Lana could ever find her by means of something so mundane as a scrying if Akua didn’t wish it. So, Lana needed to approach the problem from another angle: communication. Akua clearly planned to use Lana for some purpose. It wasn’t impossible to imagine that she might agree to talk with Lana, so long as the geas would reveal nothing of her location.
Yes. That had to be it. A first step. She brought the flute to her lips for the first time in months and began to play. She found herself reconstructing the tune her father had written for her mother, but adjusted to the higher register of the flute. She tapped her foot lightly to keep time and closed her eyes. She could feel the power swirling around her like a charged fog, feel the eyes of the spirits, the net of power from Akua’s sacrifice reaching out and tying them to her. The rush of danger was immediate and intoxicating: if she did not have the strength to bend these spirits to her will, they would devour her. She thought again of Tulo in the black book, and the strange world of her spirit sight. Lana had only barely glimpsed the spirit world, but she imagined that right now a menagerie must surround her.
She put the flute down, but kept her eyes closed. “The geas binds the human with the spirit, the will with its pure effect.” She paused. Now what? Her hands began to shake and she forced them still. It felt like she was throwing herself into an abyss. She hadn’t recited a nonconforming geas in so long. She thought of Aoi, plunging herself and her friends into the spirit world on a whim. She’d survived long enough to write the book. And what someone as inexperienced as Aoi could do, Lana could do also. “I bind the sound of this flute, and the power therein, to the sound of its maker and her will. Carry my voice to the witch called Akua and bring her voice back to me.”
The faint outside light that penetrated her eyelids was extinguished like a candle flame. She opened her eyes in panic, but she could see nothing but inky black. She could hear nothing but her own breathing, harsh and short, and the increasingly frantic pounding of her heart. What had she done? Had she tapped into some power she couldn’t contain when she invoked Akua’s flute itself?
But no, she had no sensation of overwhelming power, of angry spirits freed from bondage. Just this silence, and now, just at the edge of her hearing, the faintest of noises. Waves, perhaps, crashing against a forgotten shoreline. The creak of feet shuffling across ancient, water-shrunk boards. A ship? Unsurprising. And then Akua spoke.
“This is clever, Lana,” she said.
Lana felt her cheeks flush in reflexive pleasure and then frowned. Akua had deliberately set out to ruin her life for reasons still obscure to her. So why was it still so hard to keep perspective while in the witch’s presence? Why did she still feel like her eager student?
“I don’t imagine I’d still be alive if I weren’t clever,” Lana said, with more venom than she’d intended. “Of course, you’d know more about that than I do.”
“Perhaps,” Akua said. Lana could almost see Akua’s enigmatic half-smile, the complacent way she would lean back in her chair and wait for Lana to piece together some puzzle. “But I doubt you went through so much trouble, with such an unusual geas, to snipe at me. What do you want?”
“
My mother back
!” The words seemed to explode in the unnatural occlusion surrounding her. A burst of red fire in pitch black. She blinked in the darkness.
“I see you do,” Akua said quietly. She seemed surprised as well. At least, that’s how Lana interpreted the suddenly somber tone. “I’m afraid I’m not quite done with her yet.”
“Have you—”
“She’s safe. I enjoy her company, actually. What I’m doing won’t harm her at all, Lana. That’s not what this is about. It was an ancient, dangerous geas you cast that solstice. It’s tilted my plans a little.”
Lana opened her mouth and then forced it shut. In her own oblique, meandering way, Akua was revealing things about her true purpose. Lana couldn’t afford to scream whatever insults sprang to her tongue and lose the chance to glean a few more hints.
“I’ve learned a lot in the past year, Akua. I have some idea of how powerful you must be. How much you must know. Give me leave to doubt that anything I’m capable of could tilt your plans in any way.”
Akua was silent for so long Lana grew afraid that she’d closed the connection. But when she spoke, it was with the considered wryness Lana remembered so well. “You have learned a lot. I can see that. Perhaps you’ll resent this, but I’m very proud. I don’t think you understand, Lana. I would never have picked you. . .I
could
never have picked you if you weren’t capable of tilting my plans. There was no other way to bind the geas, no other way to find the proper balance. It wouldn’t accept anyone less than my equal.”
Lana was startled into a denial. “But I’m not your equal,” she said.
“You could be.”
Lana heard her breathing grow harsh and ragged; sweat clung to her skin like the mist from a fog. Akua’s equal? Master of spirits from every quadrant? And how had Akua become the greatest witch in the islands? She had tricked people into sacrifices—countless others just like Pua, agreeing to a sacrifice they didn’t understand, and often paying for the mistake with their lives. And others, like a cobbler back in Okika, had agreed to Akua’s demands, knowing precisely what that entailed. She had manipulated and murdered and sacrificed her way to an almost unimaginable level of control. Lana thought of Ino, who had collapsed with the agony of stretching his geas enough to give Lana the black book. A geas Akua had laid on him.
“I won’t,” Lana said, her voice trembling with such righteous anger she almost didn’t recognize herself. “I’ll die before I let myself become as cruel as you. I won’t sacrifice my integrity for power.”
“But haven’t you already? What about your mother?”
And it was like she was at the water temple again, Kai confronting her over what she should have known about the linked mandagah jewels. Akua was right. Lana had already crossed that line. She’d already sacrificed a life for her own desires. How was she to know that every sacrifice Akua had manipulated or forced hadn’t been for something she cared about as deeply as Lana cared about her mother? If she could justify her own actions, why couldn’t Akua?
Or if she had a line, shouldn’t she draw it now?
“I love my mother,” she said, her voice raw as a fresh wound. “More than you could possibly know. I’ve already become more like you than I’d ever have wanted. I’ve had to make choices no one should have to make. But if it comes to this, if I have to become you to defeat you, I will lose.”
“Your mother—”
“
I will lose
.”
Akua’s sigh floated through the darkness like the breeze from a lake. “Oh, Lana,” she said. Pride and despair and maybe even hope.
“Akua,” Lana said, “why are you—”
“The death!” Akua’s voice was frantic, and then gone. Lana could see again, but the only thing in her vision was the death’s mask, glowing and quivering with the anticipation she now understood.

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