Racing the Dark (17 page)

Akua's face, of course, remained impassive. "What will you give me for my services?" she asked.

"I'm a simple man," he said. "But I will give you all of our savings, everything, if you'll come."

Akua smiled slightly. "Keep your money. I'm sure your wife and child will need it. No, from you I request something different: a sacrifice, freely given."

The man blanched and for a second Lana was afraid he might vomit. She felt a little sick to her stomach, as well. What was Akua doing? It seemed too cruel to force a man as desperate as this into sacrificing himself.

"Sacrifice," he said as though he were forcing the word past his throat. "Like Apano?"

"He got what he wanted, didn't he?

"What will my sacrifice be?" he asked after a long pause.

Akua glanced at Lana briefly and then shook her head. "That can be decided later. Suffice it to say, it will be reasonable. Do you accept?"

The man closed his eyes and nodded. "For the sake of my wife and child."

Akua levered herself up from the chair. "Get my things, Lana. And don't forget the surgery, we may need it."

Most of what she learned from Akua actually had nothing much to do with the real workings of power. Akua always told her that power should be understood, respected, and used rarely-for all power required sacrifice, and that could never be given too freely. Instead, she taught Lana healing and midwifery. Every so often-usually a few months after the end of the spirit solstice-a woman from the village, cloaked and terrified, would beg Akua for a special draught to rid herself of an unwanted pregnancy and sometimes a charm to prevent one. These did require a minor geas to work well, and Akua had taught Lana how to make them. Anyone who could master those subtleties, she told her, would be sought after by queens and prostitutes alike. Lana had begun to learn the secrets of midwifery, but that skill was considerably more complicated, and this birth especially so.

The woman had already lost an amazing amount of blood. The bed sheets were drenched in it, making her sallow face look even paler. She was sweating and moaning, and seemed to be floating in a state somewhere between consciousness and death.

"How long has she been like this?" Lana asked the man quietly, as Akua removed the sheets and prepared to examine her.

"She first passed out a few hours ago," he said.

Akua looked up at the two of them. "She's very close to death," she said. "We have to hurry. Lana, I want you to boil the knives in water and prepare a draught to help stop her bleeding. It needs to be very strong-you can use him for the sacrifice, if you want."

The very thought made Lana's stomach clench and she shook her head. It wouldn't require a very large sacrifice, after all. In the corner of the cottage with a stove she grabbed two pots and dipped both of them in the barrel of well water his wife kept by the door. Lana had memorized in detail the recipe for the draught to stop bleeding, although she had never made it with a sacrifice before. The herbs themselves were enough in most situations, though clearly not now. She worked quickly, ignoring the man's worried presence behind her, and finished in fifteen minutes. She carefully fished a knife out of the boiling water and held it above her hand.

"A sacrifice of my body, freely given," she said and ran the knife over her palm. As the blood dripped into the bubbling water she sensed the anticipatory presence of the power around her. Her heart pounded with fear and reluctant pleasure-this was always what she loved most about calling on power, that moment when anything could happen, and the result was ultimately in her control.

She recited the traditional geas carefully:

The reaction was instantaneous. Though it was a relatively minor geas, the power she felt flow into the draught might just have been enough to save that woman's life. She poured the finished brew carefully into a pewter flask and brought it, along with Akua's boiled instruments, to the woman's bedside. The man looked terrified at the sight of the knives.

"You aren't going to hurt her, are you?" he said. "You swore-"

"I keep my word," Akua said sharply. "Your wife is near death. You'd do well to stop talking and let me save her."

He offered no more objections. Akua took the hot draught from Lana, smelled it and looked at her with slightly raised eyebrows.

"You used your own, I see," she said.

Lana shrugged, a little defiantly. "Self-sacrifice is more powerful."

"His would have been perfectly adequate, Lana. But, as you choose. It's well done-thoughtful of you to put in so much bitterwort."

"For the pain," Lana said. "I thought you may ... cut the baby out. She'll need it."

Akua smiled and turned back to the woman writhing deliriously on the bed. She held the draught to her lips and calmly, gently even, made her drink the entire contents. Lana wiped where it dribbled out of her mouth with a clean cloth. When the woman finished she seemed to relax a little, and sunk into a deeper faint.

"The baby's head is facing the wrong direction and the birthingcord is wrapped around its neck," Akua said. The man, kneeling by his wife's side and holding her hand, cringed but kept silent. "If we let her deliver it, the baby will be strangled and she'll probably die. So you guessed correctly, Lana. We have to cut."

Lana stared-she had been amazed when Akua had told her such things were possible, but she had never expected to assist such an operation. "Have you done this before?" Lana asked.

The look in Akua's eyes was distant, but frighteningly intense. "Once," she said. "But then I had both my arms. I will tell you what to do, Lana, but today you must do it."

Lana was too stunned to even protest. She felt numb as she prepared herself-swabbing the woman's swollen belly with alcohol, setting up the instruments.

"What do I do now?" Lana asked, forcing her hands to stop trembling.

"Take the small knife," Akua said. "Make a vertical cut from her navel about two handspans long."

Lana took the knife and lowered it to the woman's stomach. She felt the man's eyes boring into her side, but she refused to look at him. She couldn't afford to see his terror now.

"Don't cut deep," Akua said. "You can't cut the baby."

Lana took a deep breath and lowered the knife. More blood slid down the woman's too-pale skin as she cut as carefully as she could. She felt like she had entered a trance. The blood didn't affect her anymore, and she was barely aware of anyone else's presence except this woman and her baby. When she finished making the cut she pulled the skin apart slightly at Akua's instruction and saw the thinner membrane of the woman's womb. Akua told her to make another vertical cut, this time with an even smaller knife. She slid her hands inside the exposed womb. The baby was there, and alive. She felt its tiny heart beating below her searching hands. She found the birthing-cord and, as carefully as she could, unwound it from around its neck. The woman began gasp ing again, and Akua went to her side and muttered a few quick words. She calmed down, but Lana could tell that she had very little time left.

"Pull the baby out, Lana," Akua said. "I'll help push from here."

Lana nodded and tried to get a firm grip on his body. She pulled him out gently, head first. His upper body was still covered in part of the caul, but when she pulled it off he took a few experimental gasps of air before crying.

The rest of the process was messy-clearing out the afterbirth, carefully stitching her skin closed-but Lana barely noticed. She glowed with the knowledge that she had saved two lives that night.

Manuku hated the column of air in the center of the 'Ana's tower. He struggled to ignore it while he swept and dusted, but he always found himself sneaking sidelong glances and then wishing that he hadn't. Dark things swirled inside that column-light that passed through it came out distorted and twisted. The air felt colder there-though it was, of course, always frigid on the island. His family had served the inner death shrine since right after the great 'Ana's spirit binding. He alone was trusted with sweeping the Honored One's now-abandoned chambers.

She was said to be immortal, the 'Ana, legendary binder of the death spirit. His great-grandfather had cleaned these chambers when there had been a body occupying them, but she had disappeared over a century ago. No one knew where-and in fact, only Manuku, his young daughter, and the High Priest himself knew that she was gone at all. And unless something went terribly wrong, it was unlikely that anyone else would ever find out.

Manuku's family possessed a certain genetic trait that had made them very valuable to the 'Ana and the priests on the island: almost all were born deaf. The hand-language they spoke had been passed down for generations, and now probably resembled archaic speech more closely than the modern tongue everyone else spoke today. Other than his own family, only the High Priest could speak their sign language, which effectively stopped any information about the 'Ana from leaving the island. It was forbidden for any of Manuku's family to learn to write. Of course, he had never wanted to learn the complicated system of pictographs regardless. His life was simple. Every day he cleaned the great altar of whatever might have been left of the offerings from the night before and helped to train his daughter to succeed him. Once a week, he climbed the interminable steps to the 'Ana's chamber and wished that he might somehow be relieved of this burden.

When he was a boy, his father had warned him about that column of air. He told Manuku that the column went straight through the earth to the binding chamber itself, where the restless spirit remained imprisoned. If you looked into it too deeply, his father had said, the death spirit would show you many things-some lies, some truths, but almost always things you would wish you had never seen. His father died in a freak accident when Manuku was sixteen. A spark from the great fire in the offering chamber caught on the ancient altar cloth and the blaze went up so quickly his father had no time to escape. He had been burned over most of his body before they managed to put it out. He died two days later, telling Manuku with his ruined hands that he had seen his own death years ago, in the column. Yet that wasn't what still haunted Manuku about that day.

"I saw the 'Ana," he had said while Manuku struggled not to cry. "She was fighting the death spirit, but it was too powerful. It broke free. As she died it exploded onto the world..." His father gasped and then briefly held Manuku's hand in a near-painful grip. "Never forget who we guard, Manuku. In this very island is the embodiment of death. Never forget what would happen if it breaks free ... and it wants to break free, Manuku."

Manuku often thought about his father when he cleaned the 'Ana's chambers. He wondered if what his father saw had merely been more of the death spirit's lies, or if it had been as real as his vision of his own death. Today, the column of air was a dense, roiling cloud of half-formed shapes, as though the death spirit was more excited than usual. When he glanced at it against his better judgment, the vague shapes he saw there disturbed him, but he never looked at it long enough to be sure. He cleaned the dusty, echoing chamber with his eyes half-closed, airing out the bedding on the balcony and cleaning dust from the closets, all of which opened on the left side. He was wiping off the hand mirror when he caught a glimpse of an unusually clear image in the column behind him. Though he knew he should put it down and leave, he found his eyes riveted to the reflected image. A young girl was sitting in a boat. Despite the rain hat pulled down over her face, he could still tell that her gaze had a certain flashing strength-this, combined with skin darker than Manuku had ever seen before, made the girl's looks striking, but not unappealing. She was speaking with a strange creature nearly as pale as she was dark, with blue-veined skin and hair that shimmered hypnotically. Though he had never seen one before, he knew that he must be looking at some kind of lesser spirit. He had no idea who the girl was, but anyone who could converse so freely with spirits had to be very powerful. Suddenly, the image shifted. Now he saw the binding chamber, which he recognized immediately though he had only been there once in his life. The girl was older now, and those strong eyes had gone hard and inexpressibly sad. She stood in charred clothes before the worn, gray-flecked stone at the base of the column of air. Jammed upright in the stone-the hardest known to man-was a yellowed, broken shard of bone. Beyond the column was another woman with skin just as dark as the girl's, being held by a manifestation of the death spirit itself. The girl brought a white flute to her lips. When she began to play, both the stone and the bone inside it shattered, and the freed death spirit roared up the column of air ...