The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (34 page)
Read The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Online
Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson
Lana took to the north almost eagerly, in the tense hope that at last, one way or another, Essel would know who ruled it. And if they were lucky, the rebels would win and avoid the level of bloodshed that might cause lasting damage to the bindings.
But all such hopeful thoughts were eradicated when she finally found the rebels battling north through the sixth district. They had covered a surprising amount of territory, she thought, given the brief time that had passed since the battle began. Nearly a quarter of the way to the old harbor already. But an updraft nearly sent her tumbling out of the sky when she flew overhead. As she approached the earth, she grew aware of the oppressive heat and choking smoke. It took her longer than it should have to realize what was happening. After all, Kohaku had always been remarkably intelligent, whether investigating the customs of a backwater outer island or waging war in the world’s largest city.
The rebels were gaining territory. But every inch Kohaku had to cede, he burned to the ground.
The strategy would have been even more dangerous, she supposed, if it weren’t for the snow that quickly banked the fires before they could spread. A small blessing. She could see people frantically fleeing into the rebel lines. To Eliki’s credit, the soldiers let anyone who looked like a civilian through. But the careful rows of charred and blackened buildings told their own story. Even if the rebels won this battle, would it be worth the cost? Several thousand more hungry mouths to feed, and only the sympathizers in the seventh district able to provide food? And with every shelter and all of their belongings systematically destroyed, how long before the sixth district started blaming the rebels for the destruction they’d allowed to happen?
Lana rushed to find Eliki as soon as she landed. The rebel leader had called a temporary halt to their forward march. A wise strategy, Lana thought, but the only one she could reasonably pursue at this moment. Eliki was giving terse instructions to two small runners when she saw Lana approaching.
“Well,” Eliki said sourly. Her face was nearly black with ash and her clothes soaked through. Lana wondered how she wasn’t shivering or ill, but the war apparently agreed with her. She looked fierce and beautiful, for all her disconcerting paleness. “Your friend was born in the wrong age. He’s ruthless enough for the Maaram, isn’t he? He’d burn down the whole city just to save it.”
“What will you do?”
Eliki shrugged. “Wait. Pretend that we’re considering his patently fake truce. They won’t want to fight at night, not in this weather. By that time everyone should have had time to flee.” She paused and regarded Lana. “Might the spirits help? Lipa, the apothecary, said there’s not much your witchery can do for us, but perhaps you’d know better.”
Lana was surprised. “A geas? To fight a war? Eliki, the sacrifices I’d need in order to make even a bit of difference. . .”
She shook her head. “Lipa said as much. I understand now why there are so few witches. So much sacrifice for so little return.”
Lana was inclined to agree with her, but she still had to smile. “And waging a rebellion in the heart of Essel?”
“Perfectly reasonable, of course.” Eliki looked back out at the blackened remains of the sixth district houses. What fires still burned were even now being doused in a blanketing white. “If we’re lucky, maybe the snow will make the houses so wet that he won’t be able to burn them down even if he tried.”
“And if the snow stops?”
She looked away. “There’s nowhere we can go but forward.”
Lana understood now how self-righteous she had been in their previous arguments, as though Eliki didn’t precisely grasp the moral consequences of her actions, as though they didn’t matter to her. They mattered very much. But there are sometimes only bad choices. If Eliki surrendered now, Kohaku would ruthlessly decimate the rebel forces. If she pressed on, Kohaku might turn the entire sixth district into a funeral pyre. She had nowhere to go but forward.
So Lana simply asked, “Do you have a message for Pano?”
“You can tell him what you’ve seen. He’ll understand.”
Lana nodded and gathered her tired muscles for one last flight.
“Oh, and ask him for more bows. My archers are clumsy with the shafts.”
An amorphous worry nagged at Lana for a moment, but Eliki was soon distracted with further preparations and she shrugged it off. Pano took her news about the sixth district as calmly as he took everything, but she could tell that he was shaken. The bows here were not holding up much better than they were anywhere else. And Kohaku’s tactics horrified her.
“I can’t believe he’s doing this,” she said, shivering beneath the blanket that Pano had draped over her shoulders when she landed.
“He’s very smart, Bloody One-hand. But you ought to know that.” Pano flashed her a wry smile and checked again on the Mo’i soldiers. They had gathered warily just beyond the range of rebel arrows, waiting on a signal from Kohaku. And all around them the impossible snow continued to fall, thicker and even more implacable than ashfall. The wind blew it up into great dunes against the bulk of the fortifications and the burned-out buildings nearby.
Lana looked up at the uniform sky, curiously bright despite the twilight gloom. The few torches mounted on the wall at irregular intervals reflected orange in the falling snow. She was reminded of Kai. She hadn’t seen him all day, but she knew he had been with Eliki for much of the battle.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to stop, does it?” she asked.
“The war?”
“The snow. Eliki said the more snow we get, the better chance we have of winning.”
“Well, at least it means that One-hand can’t burn down half the city in spite. But it’s just as hard for us to move on slick ground covered in knee-high ice as it is for them.”
Since the snow and dark had effectively ended the fighting for the day, Pano accompanied Lana back to the northern front. Eliki was encamped under a tent just barely warmer than the outside air and in danger of collapsing under the heavy white drifts piled on top of the oilcloth. The soldiers here were an even more motley assortment than Lana was used to seeing around rebel territory. Women and men and some children who couldn’t have been older than thirteen sat huddled around fires and in abandoned buildings, attempting to wait out the night and the snow. They wore no uniforms and carried makeshift weapons—indeed, this was the only characteristic that clearly distinguished them from Kohaku’s soldiers, who were equipped with blades whose only purpose had ever been to kill. The rebel soldiers, such as they were, fought mostly with adzes and kitchen knives and makeshift spears. They guarded their skin with clothing padded with packed straw in the worst case, and haphazard greaves of bamboo in the best. They were not suited for fighting, nor practiced at it, but they had determined to do so anyway. Lana wondered at that. Up until the unexpected start of this war, refugees had steadily streamed into the rebel encampment. Why couldn’t they be like her father and accept the brutalities of Kohaku’s regime? Perhaps they had just been affected by it too directly.
The little remaining food from the stores had been passed out among the soldiers. The sight of even those meager meals made Lana’s stomach rumble. Inside the tent, Eliki was writing a letter and ignoring the plate of food sitting on the table. She looked up sharply when the two of them came in and frowned.
“Sea Street—”
“Safe. It’s the snow. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Eliki’s smile was small, but satisfied. “I doubt you ever will again. It was a bright day when you brought the water guardian to us, Lana.”
There was something so specific in her pleasure that Lana knew Kai had done something for them. “Where is he?” she asked.
Eliki waved her hand as though this hardly mattered. “He said he needed to get to the ocean, so I gave him a cloak to hide that hair of his. He should be back soon.”
“The ocean?” Lana repeated. She remembered when they had lived together at the water shrine, how he would sometimes spend days among the water sprites, almost entirely losing that part of him that was human. She knew that he needed that sometimes, but to go to the ocean in this weather in the middle of a battle. It could only mean that he had been working some sort of powerful, draining geas. “What did you have him do?”
“You were just walking through it,” Eliki said.
At this, even Pano was shocked. “The water guardian caused the snow?”
“Not at first. But he has persuaded enough water from up off the ocean to keep this snow going for at least two more days.”
Lana hugged her elbows, not entirely against the cold. Two more days? He must be exhausted. She hoped he would come back soon. She hadn’t seen him since this morning.
Pano pulled up two stools and gave Lana Eliki’s untouched plate of food. She started to eat it, numbly, while the two rebel leaders argued about the implications of the weather.
“You know we can’t fight as well as One-hand’s army, in any case,” he said. “If he decides to forge ahead in this snow. . .”
“He’d be mad to.”
“Our Mo’i is not famed for his sanity.”
“Well, his soldiers might just refuse. I think he won’t risk it. Not while we offer him the chance of armistice.”
“And when we renege? Even the water guardian can’t make the snow vanish.”
“No, perhaps not. But it will be easier for us to push ahead in the snow than it is for One-hand to defend it. And he won’t be able to burn down the city.”
Pano sighed and dropped his head into his hands. His dark, curly hair seemed to have turned half gray in the last few weeks. Lana wondered how much longer either of them could keep up this pace. “I’ve asked One-hand’s wife to speak with him one more time. Perhaps she can convince him to end this.”
Eliki considered Pano and shook her head as though in regret. “You are good to try, no matter how hopeless the errand.”
Pano gave a brief, bitter laugh. “I miss orchids. At least they listen to reason.”
Kai went to the seventh district, the rushes, because he knew he’d encounter the fewest people there. Even the water guardian reached his limit sometimes—inevitably during the Weeping ceremony, where each water guardian sacrifices his life for his son’s power, but sometimes before. His connection to the waterbird of legend gave him access to a vast reservoir of sacrificial power, but even that was tied to his own well-being. He couldn’t do something as drastic and extreme as what Eliki had asked of him today—piling enough water vapor into the clouds above Essel to cause the snow storm to continue for two more days—without risking his life.
And so, despite the cold and the snow he himself had caused, and the battle raging in half of the city, Kai needed to find water. He left his clothes on the dunes and walked naked through the snow-piled sand until he reached the foamy surf. The waves were high and ragged, disturbed by the storm and the semi-frequent murmurs of the earth that had occurred ever since the eruption. He was still human, so the frigid water made his skin turn blue and his teeth chatter until his jaw hurt. Then the first wave crashed over him and he dissolved.
It was a relief, after all this time, to give in to that aspect of his nature where his humanity became a memory so distant that it took him whole tide-turns to even remember his name. There were sprites near the shore, just as there were everywhere, but not so many as he would have thought. They regarded him with wary respect; they knew him immediately but had never seen his kind before. Water guardians are well known for their reluctance to venture beyond the waters of their shrine. He drifted on the top of the water like sentient sea foam, confident enough in even this dangerous form to not mind when a whale blasted him apart. He came back together languidly, his separated selves a curiosity. He remembered the first time he had taken this form: Lana had drowned, thanks to that horrible sprite who lived in his grandmother’s well. She hadn’t been breathing when he re-formed in the water and dragged her back out. Even now, as far from his human thoughts and emotions as he could travel, he felt a chill shadow of the fear that had gripped him then, and every time since when Lana dealt with the death spirit. One day she would lose. He knew it. She had to know it, too, but she didn’t seem to care.
He heard the moonrise like a lover’s call, pulling him up toward the sky, pushing him further up the shore. He sighed with the tides, though the moon itself was entirely obscured by snow clouds. Slowly, some measure of his strength returned to him. Sprites of all kinds started to surround him, compelled by his connection to the waterbird and his own bright essence. As the tide came in, he fed on their power. It wasn’t an arrangement like a geas, a straightforward binding of power based on sacrifice. This was a far murkier transfer, based on his spirit nature, not his human one. He was strange and powerful and yet like them; he was a creature of the greatest sprite of all and so they honored him for it.
Eventually, Kai realized that he was being swept farther out to sea and took shape again. Not his own, but that of a seal. He wouldn’t be able to make powerful geas for several days without additional sacrifices, but at least he wasn’t in danger of dissolution. Lana would be worried about him. He pushed through the water, exhilarated by his speed and agility. He had missed this. Soon enough, he washed ashore, fully human again. Now, the cold inevitably whipped at his naked body. He rushed to his pile of clothes, but stopped.
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