The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (32 page)
Read The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Online
Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson
“Like what? Going to Bloody One-hand and hoping he won’t massacre us all for believing we should have better governance?”
“Don’t put it so—”
“Intelligently?”
“Like one of your damn pamphlets! Not everything stands or falls on principles. There are people—not just your rebel soldiers, but regular struggling people—who will die when you fight your way north.”
“We’re issuing a call for all in the area to leave or join us here.”
“And you think everyone will? What about the old, the sick, the injured? Imagine them stuck in their half-burned homes, wondering if it will be the rebels’ or Kohaku’s arrows that kill them?”
Eliki’s mouth thinned. Suddenly, her eyes seemed not so much pink as red, reflecting the fire. “We do what we must. There are no perfect solutions.”
“You’re playing with people’s lives, as though they don’t matter.” “We’re saving them. Or have you forgotten why those people are sick and injured? Why their homes are half burned? Why there is no one in this city who hasn’t lost someone they love to a painful, fiery death?” Lana’s throat felt very dry. “So you’ll become as bad as him to stop him?” she asked, though almost immediately she wished she hadn’t.
Eliki leaned back in her chair; fire extinguished, suddenly exhausted. “If you’re as naive as all that, then I don’t know why you’re here. Go back to your father. Help him tend the injured in One-hand’s hospitals. Congratulate yourself on your benevolent good works. But leave us be, for we have work to do.”
So Lana stood and left her, angry and wounded and inexplicably ashamed.
It was difficult to entice the head nun out of her temple, but Kohaku had done so that afternoon, much to Makaho’s thinly veiled displeasure. The ash clouds filtered the sun into perpetual twilight, turning the winter air chill enough that even Makaho had deigned to drape her pendulous breasts in a swath of austere black barkcloth secured with a rope. Even so, her hands were red and chapped with cold. Kohaku ordered a tea service brought for them before she could object. The fire temple might be one of the most luxurious dwellings in Essel, but the head nun lived as simply as an outer island officiant. Kohaku had never seen any evidence that Makaho harbored the slightest religious conviction, and yet he had to admit that she held herself detached, as though all of these mundane politics in which she so forcefully engaged were only an ugly means to a higher purpose. She accumulated power and wealth like an urchin does a stench, and yet she seemed to use none of it for personal gain. She flaunted her ascetism and used it to her advantage. Kohaku sipped his tea and watched as Makaho leaned closer to the fire. What hair she had left was wiry, gray, and closecropped. Her eyes were a small, hard brown and her skin was dark for an Esselan and liberally marked with old burns.
“Am I particularly beautiful today, Mo’i?” she asked, her thin lips twisting into habitual scorn.
Kohaku looked down quickly at his tea and grimaced. “Much the same as always,” he said.
Makaho laughed. “Ah, neatly done. But I assume you did not call me here to admire my looks.”
Kohaku stood abruptly, agitated as he had been for the last several days. “Of course not,” he said, and was surprised to hear what sounded like a snarl.
“You could have come to the temple,” Makaho said, unfazed. “It raises fewer questions.”
He stared at her for a moment and then began to pace. “Your temple has leaks,” he said, and was pleased that the effort to keep his voice steady had largely succeeded.
This didn’t surprise her. “It’s a large facility. As is the Mo’i’s house. Nothing of importance has escaped.”
Nothing? He wondered bleakly. Yet how long before he saw this headline in those damned rebel pamphlets:
Bloody One-hand can save the city—his self-sacrifice will put Nui’ahi to rest.
Kaleakai, the water guardian, was still walking free and helping the rebels. It had been five days since the two guardians had confronted him in the temple. If the public heard what they had said, Kohaku wondered if any army would be large enough to protect him then.
Bloody One-hand can save the city—his self-sacrifice will put Nui’ahi to rest.
Kaleakai, the water guardian, was still walking free and helping the rebels. It had been five days since the two guardians had confronted him in the temple. If the public heard what they had said, Kohaku wondered if any army would be large enough to protect him then.
“Every day he stays free you’re in greater danger,” Emea said, appearing beside Makaho.
Kohaku ignored her. If he was insane, he couldn’t afford to let anyone know it, especially not a ruthless player like the head nun.
“You know what you have to do,” said his sister.
He glared at her, realized what he had done, and quickly shifted his gaze to Makaho. “I know what we must do,” he said.
She inclined her head. “And what is that, Mo’i?”
“Lay a trap for him.”
She tilted her head in polite confusion. “Who?”
Too late, Kohaku realized that he had been continuing his conversation with Emea. “The water guardian. Kaleakai,” he said.
“I didn’t realize he had become an ongoing concern. I take it your meeting didn’t go well?”
Kohaku resisted the urge to scream. “He’s a threat to the stability of my government. There’s no other way. Something with a geas, but a trap, otherwise no one will be strong enough to overpower him. Do you know a witch we can trust enough for this?”
Makaho put down her tea. “Are you suggesting we kill the water guardian through treachery, Kohaku?”
Her tone was remarkably flat. She could have been asking him if he preferred amant or palm wine for all of her apparent interest in the answer. One could be lulled by her pretense of disinterest, but he had learned caution.
“No, I’m suggesting we capture him through treachery. He knows too much. I hear he’s helping the rebels—”
“He’s the black angel’s lover, and
she’s
helping the rebels.”
she’s
helping the rebels.”
That bit him more than it should have. “So then he’s a danger,” Makaho tilted her head slightly, a gesture that might have been appealing on a younger, beautiful woman but on her looked merely sinister. “So they both are. You’ve already tried to kill her once.”
She’d heard about that? But better not to show his surprise. “He’s more important. If we capture him, we’ll have leverage over the rebels. Especially if he’s with Lana.”
“I see,” she said, and he realized that she must have guessed some of it. But it didn’t matter—she knew better than most how Kohaku’s secrets drove him. He just needed to prevent her from knowing the details.
“I have some familiarity with geas,” she said. “Nothing that could harm him in a direct confrontation, but a clever trap I think I could manage.”
This surprised him. “I’ve never seen you lay a geas before.”
She shrugged. “I prefer to leave the fire spirit to its business. There are still those, you know, who don’t feel the spirit bindings were an entirely wise decision.”
Kohaku could only stare. Makaho, the head of the largest monument to the spirits in all of Essel, had sympathies with the napulo fringe movement?
“Like the barbarians who live on the wind island?”
Makaho smiled with bloodless lips. “Like them. Like a few other, more civilized people. The spirits were bound by people, Kohaku. They can be unbound.”
“With such marvelous results,” he said, gesturing west without thinking.
“And to think, the napulo disciples have made you a hero.”
The irony resonated a second later and he flushed. Of course. Who else would a representative of the fire spirit, a sympathizer with the anti – spirit-binding napulo, align herself with than the one who had helped weaken that very spirit’s bonds?
“See, brother? You did a good thing. The times are changing.”
Kohaku turned on his heel so he could avoid Emea’s blue flame eyes. Everything had gone wrong since the fire spirit’s temple, hadn’t it? And no matter how he tried to smother the flames, ever more kept leaping up around him.
“So you’ll help me with this?” he said, still turned away from her.
“When have I refused you, Mo’i?”
Indeed. Such was the nature of her hold over him, the nature of his utter dependence. “I heard my daughter was ill,” he said. Around Makaho he didn’t bother to mask the pain that entered his voice whenever he mentioned Nahoa or Lei’ahi. She knew so much that any subterfuge would be vanity.
“Yes,” she said. There was a strange note in her voice—almost tentative—that made him turn around. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “It was very bad. I don’t know what you heard.”
He felt as though he’d been punched in the gut. He sank less than gracefully into his seat and took a long pull of his bitter, lukewarm tea.
“You should have sent for me.”
“She wouldn’t have let you in. You know that.”
He supposed he did. “But there was no reason not to tell me after. Not unless you suspected something.” He paused. “Something much worse than a leak.”
Makaho placed her hands primly in her lap, but he knew he had finally hit upon something that disturbed her. “I have no evidence it was anything other than a natural illness. She’s quite recovered. Children sicken all the time.”
“But you suspect, don’t you?”
“I have no evidence.”
“Oh, since when do you need evidence, Makaho? I thought you could smell deception.”
“You give me too much credit.”
Kohaku leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I think I give you just enough. You know precisely how much you’re worth to me if you can’t guarantee the safety of my wife and daughter. Do we understand each other?”
Makaho’s eyes were furious, but her voice was calm enough. “As always. I will protect them with my life.”
“And you will tell me when you discover who is responsible?”
Makaho stood with a little less grace than normal and walked to the entrance. “Of course. I have business to attend to. You will hear from me when I have the ones you want.”
He let her go and waited until he was quite sure he was alone before putting his head in his hand and letting out a long moan.
“Don’t be so sad, brother.”
Kohaku’s teacup smashed against the wall.
11
K
AI SUGGESTED THAT LANA TRY A SCRYING on Makaho, but she encountered fragments of trivial conversations and vertiginous maelstroms through which no sane mind could pass. In other words, the predictable confusion generated by someone who knew how to manipulate spirits. She pulled back. It was naive to expect the head nun of the fire temple to be vulnerable to such a simple attack. So she took out the old postulate book and flipped through the pages for fire that she hadn’t yet memorized. The dry list of postulates, “fire sucks life from air,” “fire blows a killing wind,” “the hottest flame is the one you can’t see,” made her eyes glaze over and her jaw crack before she was even halfway through. It was one thing to read through the death postulates; her sense of self-preservation, at least, kept her engaged. But fire, of the three bound spirits, had always seemed the least relevant to her life. She brushed some of the ash off of the pages and watched it sink onto the bed covers. Until now, she reflected, and applied herself with renewed focus. After an hour, however, she still hadn’t found anything that seemed like a sound base for a geas to use on Makaho.
AI SUGGESTED THAT LANA TRY A SCRYING on Makaho, but she encountered fragments of trivial conversations and vertiginous maelstroms through which no sane mind could pass. In other words, the predictable confusion generated by someone who knew how to manipulate spirits. She pulled back. It was naive to expect the head nun of the fire temple to be vulnerable to such a simple attack. So she took out the old postulate book and flipped through the pages for fire that she hadn’t yet memorized. The dry list of postulates, “fire sucks life from air,” “fire blows a killing wind,” “the hottest flame is the one you can’t see,” made her eyes glaze over and her jaw crack before she was even halfway through. It was one thing to read through the death postulates; her sense of self-preservation, at least, kept her engaged. But fire, of the three bound spirits, had always seemed the least relevant to her life. She brushed some of the ash off of the pages and watched it sink onto the bed covers. Until now, she reflected, and applied herself with renewed focus. After an hour, however, she still hadn’t found anything that seemed like a sound base for a geas to use on Makaho.
Her gaze caught on the black book, sandwiched between the bed and Kai’s small stack of belongings. She almost picked it up to start reading again, but she resisted the temptation. She didn’t believe Kai’s theory that Ino had deliberately given her the black book to distract her. But still, it didn’t hurt to have a reminder that she had more pressing goals. She spread her wings and lay down in a jumble of feathers on her pallet. The postulate book was a heavy, almost reassuring pressure on her chest. If she wanted to get around Makaho’s defenses, she needed to be clever. What would Aoi do in this situation?
“Probably just find the nearest fire spirit and make it talk,” she muttered. And then, “Damn.” If her friendship with Ino had taught her anything, it should have reminded her that spirits are independent, intelligent agents with their own desires. She had joked to Akua once that Ino let her scry without a sacrifice because she’d given him her friendship. She would probably never befriend a fire spirit, but that was no reason why she couldn’t compel one to tell her what it knew.
Excited, she flexed her wings and plucked out a small feather.
“A small flame may be devoured by a larger one, but it may also last much longer,” she said. “I bind a spurt of flame. One that has watched the conflagrations of its masters.”
She felt the power in the room, the anticipatory silence. But she realized that she had no extra way of seeing whatever spirit she had summoned.
“I bind you to speak to me,” she added.
“The great fire isn’t my master,” said a disembodied voice from somewhere near her sandal. If she squinted, she thought she could just barely make out a distorted flicker by the floor, a heat shimmer and a lick from an angry flame.
“But the great fires can devour you,” Lana said.
“So you call the shark your master?”
“Point taken.”
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