The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Read online

  True. And its emotions were not merely petty. Of late, they had even been transcendent.

  Oh, the dying souls it feasted on in the wake of the fires and ash. Oh, the thousand living flames, some as bright as hers, snuffed and snuffed and snuffed until it felt like a glutton at a banquet. The avatar had returned to the center to be subsumed by the ceaseless totality of the death godhead. But it had been forgotten, cast out again fully formed. The self-same splinter, sent to hound the water girl, the angel girl, once more. That had never happened before. The avatars are not of themselves. They are projections of the whole. Yet it seemed to be itself, to be a thing like she was a person, and the sensation stayed its hand, even when the old lady’s geas seemed to burn with urgency.

  The avatar is the death, but death is not its avatar.

  Sixty days left, the geas said. Fifty-nine days. And still it trailed her and warmed its burgeoning selfhood with her own. They were much alike in that. New-molded clay being fired in the ashes of Essel’s volcano. In the smoke from twenty thousand extinguished flames.

  “Do you really think you’ll find your mother?” it said to her, on day fifty-two.

  Shadows looked like paint beneath her eyes, but she smiled. “Honestly? Probably only if Akua lets me.”

  She would not have known that a year or even a few months before. She was finally asking the right questions, at last getting closer to their answers. It wondered how long the old lady could continue her game.

  And the lonely avatar, caught between selfhood and godhead? It bided. Day fifty-one, she realized she should visit the fire temple. The old lady’s chosen player was quickly learning the stakes. Forming her own conclusions.

  Which is the trouble with avatars, isn’t it?

  PART I

  Fate

  1

  THE WOMAN’S HAIR WAS THE FIRST part of her to catch fire—it was long, and streaked with gray, and for a horrified moment, Lana wondered if she’d finally found her mother. Her thin lips mouthed prayers that Lana couldn’t hear over the thrumming whispers of the gathered crowd. The woman had wrapped her wrists in yards of sennit braid, the brown of the rough cordage blending with her skin so that from a distance it almost looked like lumping scar tissue. A breeze blew in off the great bay, bringing with it the familiar scent of ash and—far too redolently—burning flesh.

  Beside her, an older man averted his head. “Napulo freaks,” he said, almost spitting the words into the pounded ash at their feet.

  Lana walked forward. The crowd might have been dense, but it receded like a tide at her approach, as if the splayed edges of her black wings might burn them.

  The breeze picked up—the flames traveled down the woman’s arms and caught on the sennit braid. Lana winced at the sudden flare. The woman threw her head back and collapsed to her knees. She let out a wordless wail, a high keening that made the skin on Lana’s arms prickle and tears sting in her eyes. What possible reason could anyone have to burn herself alive?

  “Someone stop her!” Lana shouted.

  But two others—also napulo disciples, she guessed, judging by the rough cordage around their arms—stood in her way.

  “We cannot let you pass, black angel,” the oldest one said, almost gently.

  The other frowned. “The great fire will be free. We know the black angel understands sacrifice.”

  Lana could have cursed, but she felt paralyzed with horror. This close, she could see the napulo woman’s blackening skin, her agonized face as she waited for the fire to consume her. How could Lana have failed to recognize this as an exercise in power, however unusual? This fanatic was giving herself up in the ultimate self-sacrifice to her ideals.

  The napulo fringe movement had, it was said, grown out of the philosophy of the very first spirit binders a thousand years ago. Even in those desperate times, not everyone had agreed upon the morality of binding the spirits. Some had thought the spirits should be revered and worshiped, and that all bindings were a perversion of the natural order. Lana had thought their kind had all but vanished, but since the great eruption, she had witnessed their growing presence in the city. It felt like an illness—after all that had happened, how could someone want to weaken the great bindings even further?

  And yet a woman had set herself on fire in the bustling courtyard mere yards away from the great fire temple of Essel.

  The woman pitched forward. If her moans had unnerved Lana, her sudden silence made her want to gag.

  “The great fire can hardly use this sacrifice,” the death said, suddenly beside her.

  Lana regarded it, grateful to have something else to focus on. She had long ago grown used to the death spirit’s unheralded comings and goings. Sometimes she felt lonely enough that its presence was even a comfort.

  “She doesn’t know the geas?” Lana asked.

  The two women blocking her path thought she had addressed them. The older one shook her head. “We offer only prayers. All bindings are immoral, black angel,” she said.

  But the power of binding is also the power of unbinding, Lana thought. She didn’t say it. Nui’ahi had erupted in a cataclysm of fire and scalding ash just two months before. Lana suspected that someone had manipulated a geas to weaken the great binding of the fire spirit, because how else could the volcano that had slept for a millennium awaken with such fury? The last thing anyone in this suffering city needed was for some misguided napulo fanatic to learn how to invoke a proper geas. She doubted anyone would survive if the volcano erupted again.

  “She’s gone,” the death said. Lana looked up and saw that the woman had become a pyre. What had looked moments before like a person was rapidly collapsing upon itself, like rotting fruit.

  Someone fell against her wings and Lana stumbled forward. The sight of the woman’s gruesome death had distracted her from the growing commotion in the crowd behind her. They had watched the woman’s self-immolation in relative silence, but now the several hundred gathered men and women were shouting and hurling invective—not at the napulo fanatics, but at the armed guards even now pushing through the crowd. Lana had just a stunned moment to realize that the Mo’i himself had come to witness this gruesome protest before his guards broke through to the front.

  “Stop her!” a guard shouted, grabbing one of the two napulo by her arm. She struggled to shake him off.

  “It’s too late,” the other said, and then the guard took a good look at the pile of smoldering char that had once been a woman and relaxed his grip.

  “If you zealots have weakened the binding…”

  “I think Bloody One-hand’s already taken care of that!” someone shouted from the crowd. Lana couldn’t quite tell whom.

  “Maybe our great Mo’i should just drown himself for penance.”

  There were a few shouts of agreement. Lana looked for a way to escape. The Mo’i—referred to derisively by most residents of Essel as “Bloody One-hand”—was justifiably famous for his temper and his penchant for violence. Lana didn’t want to be caught in a crowd that might as well have marked themselves for death.

  But when the Mo’i finally reached the front of the crowd, Lana’s terror vanished, replaced by something closer to awe.

  She had known that the Mo’i was called Kohaku, but she had never once suspected that he could be the same person who had been her teacher all those years ago on her home island. That Kohaku had been a student at the Kulanui, and had urged her to return with him and learn at the great school. She had refused him; she had become a black angel and a witch. And he…

  …he had become Bloody One-hand.

  “Lana?” Kohaku said. His voice was hoarse, his face too pale. His shoulders shook.

  “Great Kai,” she whispered. “It’s… Kohaku, how…” She couldn’t finish. How did we come to this place? How did we travel so far off course?

  He shook his head and offered her a rueful smile. Involuntarily, her eyes slipped down to his left arm. It ended just at the wrist. Everyone knew the tale of how the most
recent Mo’i had lost his hand when the great fire had chosen him as Essel’s next ruler. At first, Esselans had considered it evidence of his unusual devotion to the city. Then Nui’ahi had erupted, and people had other thoughts.

  Kohaku took a few jerky steps forward and embraced her. “I’d never thought to see you again,” he said. She thought she heard tears in his voice. Lana bit her tongue to stop her own. She had loved him, all those years ago. A childhood devotion, but it had felt powerful enough at the time. It had nearly torn her apart to refuse his offer, but as always her loyalty to her family came first. And now he had come back again, just as the world seemed to be falling apart.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “I wondered what had happened to you. Mo’i…”

  “Black angel.”

  They regarded each other for a moment, and then smiled. Then he looked beyond her shoulder and frowned.

  “Arrest those two,” he said. “And throw the bones in the bay.” He raised his voice. “Hear me: all practices of the napulo heresy are hereby expressly forbidden and punishable by death. This city has suffered enough—”

  “Thanks to you!” someone shouted.

  Kohaku paused. Lana almost backed away at the senseless fury that twisted his face for a moment. He nodded at one of his guards. The man who had spoken tried to escape, but the crowd blocked his way. He screamed for mercy until a guard smashed a fist into his face.

  “The great fire will stay bound,” Kohaku said. His voice was not loud, but it carried. He turned again to Lana. “I must go now. But come visit, Lana. It will be good to talk.”

  Lana nodded, torn between remembered affection and immediate horror. She knew what would happen to the prisoners taken today. Kohaku climbed into his palanquin. The crowd dispersed, muttering among themselves, but softly.

  Lana took a shaky breath. Bloody One-hand, indeed.

  Essel had become a city of the lost. Search parties regularly combed the impromptu shantytowns and the only slightly less ramshackle infirmaries. The Mo’i had installed the latter to help ease the suffering of the countless injured. Lana herself had witnessed many teary reunions—a father finally discovering both of his daughters in a shantytown, two weeks after the disaster; a wife locating her husband in a dockside infirmary, covered in burns but still recognizable. And she’d seen still more bitter disappointments, someone loved and dead, without even a body to mourn her by. Two months after Nui’ahi had erupted in the greatest explosion since the spirit bindings, the hand-lettered missing posters began to fall off the sides of buildings, tattered and forlorn. No one replaced them. The evening after her unexpected meeting with Kohaku, Lana walked past one wall plastered with at least a thousand missing faces. She wondered if, in twenty years, anyone would be alive to remember these names.

  She turned to the death now, which had faded into near-invisibility beside her.

  “How long do I have left?” she asked. It turned to her too quickly, as though startled by her question.

  “How can I tell you that?” it said, its voice oddly expressionless.

  Lana frowned. “I shouldn’t even ask?” she said. “It’s been two months since you tried to take me. I know my mother is still alive, so the geas still holds. Shouldn’t you have tried to kill me by now?”

  The corners of its mask-mouth drew up in a smile that had once intimidated her. “Is that an invitation, black angel?”

  Lana clamped her lips shut, aware that sometimes what she said to the death went beyond mere conversation. Sometimes even the most casual statement could be rendered as a geas. She shook her head, slowly. “It was when I played ‘Yaela’s Lament’ with my father, wasn’t it? It’s kept you bound all this time.”

  It inclined its head. “What else did you think? As for how much longer…we’ll see, won’t we?”

  Lana smiled, a little sourly. “So not much longer.”

  It fell silent. Lana didn’t press.

  A few people had gathered at the other end of the street, staring silently at her. She no longer minded speaking to the death in public. It could hardly draw more attention than her great black wings. They all knew that the black angel had been reborn to witness the destruction of the world. Her companion was the death itself, her benefactor the wild wind spirit.

  “Do you really think you’ll find your mother?” the death said to her, observing the crowd of people.

  She smiled. “Honestly? Probably only if Akua lets me.”

  Lana had learned a great deal in the months since her sacrifice to the wind spirit and her transformation. She had learned to trust no one—except perhaps the death, and only as far as its unchanging desire to kill her. Even from her father she hid her growing awareness of the tangled plot her mother had sold her into so many years ago in Okika. Leilani had been desperate and alone when a witch had offered her the answer to her prayers. Salvation for a sick daughter, reunion with her destitute husband—and all she had to do was let Lana become the witch’s apprentice.

  Akua, it turned out, had wanted Lana for far more than that. But how could Lana blame her mother? Even Lana hadn’t understood, and she’d had far more access to the truth than Leilani. Yet she couldn’t shake the treacherous sentiment that Leilani should have guessed. Had she asked any questions at all when Akua offered a solution to all her problems? Leilani had been the adult, not Lana. Why, out of all the impoverished women in the city, had Akua found Leilani and demanded her daughter? Had her mother ever suspected that Lana was marked by the spirits?

  At this point in her thoughts, Lana would shake her head in the manner of a dog frustrated by a persistent flea. Of course Leilani hadn’t known. The day of Lana’s initiation, when the sacred mandagah fish had given her the red jewel that marked her as one for the spirits, she had hidden it from everyone. And even after the floods came and they’d been forced to flee their beloved island, she had never quite had the nerve to tell her parents about it. Why bother? she’d thought. It was not as though she could become an elder now anyway.

  But the payment had merely been deferred: Lana had become the first black angel in half a millennium, a witness to the greatest natural disaster since the wind spirit broke free of its binding.

  On far corner of the street, a man draped in ragged barkcloth knelt and bobbed his head. In his fingers he held a length of sennit braid, worn in the manner of the napulo, who used it for prayer. Most of those who passed him by averted their gazes, but Lana paused. She threw a kala at his feet. He didn’t pause in his prayers, and she didn’t mind. She knew better than to believe a word of the napulo philosophy, but at least those who followed it were attempting, in their misguided way, to help.

  Even she, a black angel, couldn’t do more than that.

  Ahi had cried all night, refusing both Nahoa’s breast and the sweet carrot juice she normally loved, and only exhausted herself after dawn. Malie had offered to take her down the hall so Nahoa could rest, but Nahoa still didn’t quite trust her maid. Not enough to let her take her daughter. Nahoa had found it useful to pretend a great ignorance of politics. It was easy enough—she emphasized the broad vowels of her sailor’s accent, and she stared wide-eyed whenever some messenger from her mad husband, the Mo’i of Essel, came to the fire temple. She pretended she didn’t understand the nature of her stay here, and the significance of her tiny, firebirthed baby to the struggles in the streets. The Mo’i had aligned himself with the forces of the fire temple because they had his wife and his child. Nahoa understood that. And for now, she was a willing pawn. Despite everything, Malie and the horrible head nun had helped her when she needed it most. Nahoa might understand more than they gave her credit for, but she was still a novice at the intrigues they played.

  She fell asleep with Ahi on the floor by her pallet, and awoke to the sound of her daughter’s gurgling laughter. As she struggled against her body’s insistent need to sleep more now, she became gradually aware of another presence in the room.

  A stranger, she thought, peering up through misted eye
s in dim light. A man in the street clothes of a laborer, his face grimy. No surprise there—the ash fall had still not stopped a full two months after the eruption. Still, most visitors to the fire temple took great care to appear well attired and respectful.

  “Here, I brought something for you,” whispered the stranger, and he dangled a bit of ginger candy in Ahi’s mouth while she laughed and suckled. His voice tickled a memory in the back of Nahoa’s mind, but she couldn’t place it. And yet, she felt no alarm at his presence in this chamber. His eyes were warm and kind; they crinkled at the edges, like the eyes of a man used to smiling. His skin was dark, baked like a farmer’s or a sailor’s. His hands, so close to her baby’s head, smelled like just-turned earth, and she finally remembered where she had met this man.

  “The pamphlet,” she said, her voice a whisper. “That night at the cook’s party, you were the one who dropped the pamphlet in my lap. You wanted to chuck out the Mo’i.”

  He sat back on his heels and looked at her curiously. Then his face broke into a grin. Ahi laughed, too, as though she longed to be in on the joke, and he stroked the sable curls on her forehead.

  “Name’s Pano,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d remember that.”

  “Your hands still smell like dirt.” She recalled that his pamphlet had declared the fire spirit powerless, the old traditions mere superstitions. “I guess you were wrong about the fire spirit,” Nahoa said, wariness edging into her voice as she considered the implications of this man’s presence.