The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (50 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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“Have you thought about Parech?” it said.
Lana felt the bottom drop from her stomach. “Great Kai. The black book.”
 
She stared at the last page for a very long time. The final three words seemed to be in a different handwriting. Parech’s? Not Tulo’s—Lana didn’t think she’d been literate. It seemed that Aoi was the mysterious final binder, the one who had bound the death spirit. But that great Ana was rumored to have survived the binding. She must have. Isn’t that what the death said? The great sacrifice is life. So who had died, and how? What was the final postulate, the one thing the death didn’t know?
This
was the knowledge she needed to defeat Akua. It had always been about the death, hadn’t it? It was just so hard to remember when she spent her days surrounded by fire.
17
 
T
HE CORAL ATOLLS HAD BEEN MOSTLY FLOODED in the storms after the wind spirit broke free. A few scattered islands remained, but as she flew over their scorched, bleached remains, Lana thought it unlikely that any of Aoi’s pierced people still lived here. She wondered if the sacred island might have vanished, but then stopped the thought. It had to be there. She had no other options. The death glided serenely beneath her. It did not speak once in the long day it took her to reach the first of the atolls. She didn’t mind. Once she landed she took out the chart she and Nahoa had cobbled together out of what was known about the coral atolls and what Aoi had described in the book. The area most likely to hold the death island was southeast of her. She took out candied jackfruit and began to eat it, though she wasn’t particularly hungry.
“I don’t suppose you’d just tell me where the sacred island is,” she said to it.
“Have you ever thought you might learn things you don’t want to know?”
“It’s the only way I can defeat her.”
“You prove the point.”
She didn’t quite know what to make of that, so she pushed the map closer to its startlingly corporeal form. “Where is it?” she asked again.
And to her surprise, it unfurled a scaled, multi-jointed finger and pointed. They’d mapped no islands at all in that area, a bit to the north of where she’d thought to look.
She stared at it. “Why did you do that?”
“The avatar is not the death,” it said, so reflexively it sounded like a prayer. “And you are about to meet the godhead.”
The next morning, she filled two waterskins with fresh water and set out for the blank stretch of ocean the death spirit had claimed held its sacred cave. She couldn’t dismiss the idea that it regarded her with a weary, inexpressible sadness. And yet she knew it would try to kill her the moment her binding broke.
The water had risen several feet in the intervening millennium between Aoi’s visit and Lana’s. She found the jutting lump of volcanic rock just where the death had said she might, but it now rose a mere seven feet above the ocean. She didn’t immediately follow the still-clear path into the cave. She drank her water—one for now, and one for when she left—and contemplated. The last time she had sat vigil for a spirit, she had emerged a black angel. She hoped the death would grant her no such surprises, but she couldn’t be sure. The nature of a vigil was to place oneself at the mercy of the spirits. But she would do it for her mother.
“Do you wait for me in there?” she asked the death. The avatar.
And again, she sensed that sadness. It shook its head. “The godhead awaits.”
“But you’re part of the godhead.”
“I soon will be, I think.”
She stood and fought off a strange urge to make some sort of farewell. But you can’t hold the death’s hand. Or hug its robes.
“Goodbye, then,” she said.
It inclined its head. “You are worthy of us.”
Inside the cave, seawater had pooled in the sloped bottom, but the spring still ran clear and she could make out the faintest traces of the ancient cave paintings on the walls. Even the death’s mask remained, grim and timeless. She had made her decision and so she did not hesitate. The cave was chill, but she hardly noted it on her bare skin. She bathed even her wings, though it was awkward in the confines of the small spring. She took a bowl of water to the center of the cave and drank half.
“Mask, heart, and key,” she said, perhaps the first person to invoke the joining in five hundred years. “Won’t you share my drink?”
“So you have come,” it said, and she finally understood all the ways in which the avatar was not the death.
 
The death that finds her is bright and primitive, with a mask that’s little more than three crude holes in wood and a key that juts in an oblong thrust from its waist, like a fertility god. Its voice is deeper than the earth, harder than the rock they sit upon.
“The old woman,” it says, “has played this very, very well. But this might just undo you both.”
“I care nothing for her,” Lana says, biting back a fear so primal and irrational she knows that alone could kill her. “I only want my mother.”
“Then you are dead already.”
Lana takes a breath and feels as though she is drowning. The water at the bottom of the cave has risen above her eyes and she’s pulling its salt deep into her lungs. She is going to die. She is going to die. She thinks of nothing; she dreams of no one. She is an animal, a bird struggling frantically as it’s doused again and again by the waves. For a moment, there is no one that she loves and nothing that she desires. Just to live, just to live, and for no good reason at all.
“What will you give us?” says this horror, this godhead who now longs for her extinction. “What will you give us for your life? Your mind? Your love? Your choice?”
Mask, heart, and key. It is a tiny thought, nearly lost in the maelstrom of inchoate fear. And yet it grows, calming the panic, subsuming the animal terror. She recalls her loves: Leilani, Kapa, Kai. She holds again her desires: peace and her mother safe and children of her own.
“Still yet you think,” she says, her voice clear and more powerful than she’s ever heard it. “Still yet you love. Still yet you choose.”
The water vanishes as though it never was, because it never was. “I give you nothing for my life,” she says, in the hollow silence of the cave. “Because you are bound not to take it.”
“The splinter of our thought might be.”
“The avatar is the death,” she says, and she sees just a hint of the surprise and amusement that mark the death she knows so well.
“What would you see, black angel?”
She has thought very carefully on this. If she asks about Akua’s intentions directly, it might show her any number of misleading answers. But everything she has learned seems to come back to one central event: the great spirit bindings. If she understands that, she thinks, she will understand it all.
“A thousand years ago, there was one named Aoi. She went with another, Parech, to bind the great death. I would see what happened.”
The death stretches wider and wider until there are two and then three expanding and expanding until the white robes surround her. Each wears a mask and key, but each is subtly different. The oblong fertility rod morphs gradually into a tablet and then a key. The mask is smoothed and grows longer, painted white and then decorated with the markings she recognizes. The deaths take a step toward her, then another. She understands that they will overtake her, and there is nothing she can do to escape. She looks at the entrance to the cave. She could try. She could run away. The deaths approach. The terror returns with their every step. She will die, she will die, she will—
“You can do nothing to me,” she says. There it is again, that powerful voice, that unlooked-for assurance. The deaths pause.
“What will you give us?” they chorus.
“No,” she says. “You will show me what I asked.”
And they do.
It is very cold here, and she is still naked. She sees two people. They are in a different cave, standing near a rock with their backs to her. One turns and she sees it is a young man covered in tattoos. He is beautiful and has thick, kinky hair, bleached blond. She recognizes Parech like she might recognize Pano or Yechtak or her own father. The other woman must be Aoi. She is taller than Lana imagined she’d be. Her skin is lighter and her hair is long and beautiful, just like Tulo said. She wishes that Tulo could be in this vision, as well. Aoi speaks, but Lana can’t understand her. She realizes that they must be speaking Kukichan, the ancient language of the rice islands that died centuries ago. She turns to the death, frantically.
“You must tell me what they say!”
“What will you give us?”
Mask, heart, and key
. “A memory,” she says.
She understands their words. “Do you want to save him or not?” Aoi says. She sounds desperate. Lana knows that she’s deceiving him to save his life.
“If you do this, Ana, you can’t ever go back.”
“He’s your son, Parech.”
Parech turns away so that he’s facing Lana, but he looks right through her. “Why would you make me choose between you?” he says.
Aoi slams her fist against the rock, hard enough that Lana winces, even from behind. “What am
I
? You stupid barbarian Akane, what am
I
compared to your child?”
It hurts Lana to hear the hatred and self-loathing in her voice. She wants to look away, but Parech makes Aoi face him.
“You still don’t know,” he says, and he smiles and there is laughter in his eyes. Lana remembers how Aoi first met him, a dying soldier laughing at his own death. “I told you once, and you didn’t listen. I wrote it and you never found the note.”
She turns her face toward him a little more, and Lana feels a tingling in her throat, a panicked constriction in her chest that has nothing and everything to do with the scene unfolding before her. She recognizes that profile. Great Kai, but she could go blind and still know that long, straight nose, those thin lips, those broad cheekbones.
“What did you tell me, Parech?” says Aoi, now Akua. Lana hadn’t recognized her voice because it was too young and clear. A millennia had roughened Akua, like sand weathers stone.
“I said I saw you first.”
“You can’t love me.”
“You’ve doubted it?”
“Not the way you love Tulo.”
He kisses her forehead and then, as if he can hardly believe what he does, her lips. Lana shivers as she watches.
Have you ever thought you might learn things you don’t want to know?
The avatar asked her, melancholic. And
yes
, she answers now.
Yes
.
He releases her and Aoi gasps.
“Love is not like that, Ana,” he says. “To be parceled out and measured. I love you. I love Tulo. Surely, in all this time you’ve come to love me? At least a little.”
Aoi is nodding, a puppet with tangled strings. “At least a little,” she repeats. Parech has the countenance of a starving man who finds himself in a breadfruit grove. He laughs and lifts her up, but not for very long. His skin pales with the effort.
“More than a little,” he says.
“You’ve doubted it?”
“I am a stupid, barbarian Akane.”
They have sex against the rock. Lana does not look away. She wants this to be over and she wishes that she couldn’t guess how very badly this will end. Akua had two loves and now she has no one. Eventually, they prepare for the binding. Parech holds the blade and Aoi kneels on the raised stone.
“No matter what I say, you must do it,” she says, her voice trembling. Parech nods, too dazed perhaps to understand what her words imply.
“Save him, Ana.”
“Mask, heart, and key,” she says, in a language Lana recognizes as different. “I know the answer. That which the death does not know.”
Lana steps forward, eager to at last learn the secret that might free her mother. But the death of the vision does not speak to Aoi. It enters her body and she slumps quietly against the stone. Parech is frantic until he feels her pulse, and then he looks around, as though the death might appear from the walls. The stone begins to glow, like metal before it melts in a forge. Aoi, still unconscious, starts to float. The red light turns white and misty, swirling around her like fog. Parech backs away. The light punches a hole in the roof of the cave. It seems to go on forever. Aoi floats to the top and then sinks again. She opens her eyes slowly and looks around.
Still within the confines of the white, roiling mist, she calls out to Parech.
“Your knife,” she says. “Take my arm with it.”
He understands what she means. He knows that she will die if he refuses her. He doesn’t speak, but even Lana can see his grief and impotent fury as he looks up.
He will forgive them
, Aoi had written.
I doubt he will forgive me.
Lana doubts it as well. She can’t bear to watch anymore, but when she asks the death to stop it just laughs. So she covers her eyes. She still hears the sickening thunk of metal into flesh, the screams that echo endlessly off the rocks. They don’t stop for a very long time.

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