Racing the Dark (38 page)

"Do you realize what you just witnessed, my son?" asked the wind.

Yechtak nodded. He could hardly believe it, but he knew. "I saw ... she became a black angel."

"Yes. And you love her, even so?"

He nodded again. "I will always."

"Then I have a duty for you, a sacred task that only you can perform. Will you accept it? Will you do what none of your people have been asked for centuries?"

He thought of Erlun's trust in him and how he had broken it so quickly. He would not break it this time. This time, he vowed, he would be strong enough. "I accept," he said. "What do you wish me to do?"

"Leave this island, and tell the world what you have seen. Be the black angel's herald ... and perhaps the destruction to come won't give death so much strength."

Then the wind left him and he was alone.

At first only the stones themselves, the ancient red sentinels older even than the wild wind, witnessed the passage of the black angel. For her, they stirred themselves, and watched her ungainly first flight out of the ruins and over the plains. Poor girl, they thought, remembering the other, the one who flew like an eagle and not a just-born fledgling, the one who had returned and let her blood splash across the stones of the mesa so that the wild wind would be free. To the stones, it did not seem like so very long ago. They wondered how this one, too, would die.

She passed out of sight of the mesa and the wondering rock, her wingstrokes stronger now, her command of the air more sure. The dveri were the first mortal creatures to see her, and at the sight the females huddled close to the river. A great black, wheeling hrevech, they thought her-for they did not know how else to view such massive wings that blotted even the sunlight. No vicious beak or chilling caw, but nothing about the majestic figure suggested anything human. They were slow to edge away from the lake, even after its shadow dwindled to a speck. They were small; its splendor was predatory and frightening. They had never seen anything quite like it before.

Only a few children from Ofek's tribe noticed the angel, and they pointed at the sky in startled and excited shrieks that caused their dogs to bark and their caretaker to shush them. It was heading towards they ocean, they saw, a great black-winged god shot like a slingshot from the wild spirit's ruins.

"Nana! Nana!" they shouted, squinting their eyes against the bright dawn sun and just barely making out a human figure beneath those impossibly large wings.

With a sigh, Nana looked up from her beading and prepared to humor them.

Her eyes were not what they had been, but she saw what had captured the children's attention readily enough. Her dveri bone beads fell with a series of tiny smacks into the mud below.

She said a prayer, and then another. The creature she was all too afraid she recognized vanished over the ocean, with not even a feather to mark her passage.

The sudden flash of light from inside the column was so bright that Manuku stumbled backwards and landed on the hard marble floors of the 'Ana's room. Unable to stop himself, he grabbed the mirror and looked to see what had happened.

It was the girl again. He could tell that much even before the light cleared and he could see the image. Since that day four years ago when he had dared to look into the column with the 'Ana's mirror, he had seen her often. The death spirit seemed obsessed with her, especially during the past year. But this was easily the most agitated he had ever seen it. The image he saw in the column made him grip the handle of the mirror until the scalloped edges bit painfully into his skin.

She had wings. Unspeakably massive black wings that the girl was using to fly over the ocean. He thought that it must be one of the spirit's lies, but the shock and the anger that seemed to vibrate off the image told him that it was true. But how? How could any human fly? There was blood on her face, he saw, and she was crying as she beat through the air, as if it hurt her to do so.

The image suddenly changed. He saw the binding chamber, and he knew that this was the scene the death had shown him a hundred times over the last four years. He hated watching it and knew he should put down the mirror and leave, but the same curiosity that had stayed his hand so many times before kept him watching now as well. It was slightly different this time, he realized. The girl had never had wings before. Then he saw that she was holding him, and the expression on her face was so vicious that he winced. He saw the glint of a blade and then she was stabbing it into him over and over again until blood covered the front of her shirt and he could no longer even see his own face.

Manuku smashed the mirror.

11

Al STOOD UP TO HIS KNEES IN THE MUDDY CREEK that had once been the mighty Moka river. He let the water soak through his pants and the sediment settle over his feet, though he could have stayed perfectly dry if he chose. On the muddy banks to his left and right, stranded fish flopped and drowned beneath the harsh sun. Their desperate need to survive, the frantic pounding of their hearts as they slowly slipped towards death assailed his mind like a thousand tiny hammers. His head ached, but he refused to shut them out entirely. He was Kaleakai, the almostwater guardian, and even these dying river fish took some comfort in that. They hadn't made it to the tributary in time for spawning. There shouldn't have been a need to-the Moka dwindled to this degree rarely, and even then only in the high dry season. These fish had thought they had plenty of time to find a mate, to lay their eggs, to die in the cool waters upstream.

And they should have.

Aware of the futility, but unable to stop himself, Kai touched the waterbird feather in his hair and called a geas. Moments later, water coursed over his arms as though from nowhere, a torrential rush that washed all the flapping fish from the banks and into the muddy river. He forced himself to stop when all the frantic voices of their deaths had turned into sighs of contentment, the reassertion of purpose. Kai looked down at the river-it had risen barely an inch, and even that had exhausted him so he felt dizzy where he stood. Slowly, he climbed up the slippery bank and onto the tall brown grass at the river's edge. A few hundred yards across from the river, a series of rice paddies lay abandoned. The drought had dried up more than the river-back in the last village he had seen dozens of refugee farmers in line at the well. He had no idea where they would go now. He sighed and sat up, swatting at the flies that had found him in the absence of dying fish.

He needed to make it to the country inn by nightfall, but he realized he wasn't looking forward to braving human company again. He had never understood quite how alien he appeared to most people until he had left on this journey. Pua had never treated him differently and his father was ... well, his father. He knew he had powers no human could touch, but those differences had never made him feel like some sort of chimera-until now.

Of course, he thought, standing up and stretching, he wasn't very good at talking to people. Back at the village, the refugees had pointed to his hair and skin and whispered to each other in increasingly loud voices. Finally, one middle-aged man, his skin brown from the sun, had walked up to him.

"Are you a guardian?" he asked, a little belligerently.

Kai realized he didn't even know the answer. For two weeks he'd avoided the thought of going home and receiving his father's tears. Two weeks while his father waited in the antechamber of death.

"Yes," he said, inadequately.

The whispers from the crowd behind him grew into sounds of outright shock. The man looked angry. "Did you bring the drought with you? We all know it's the spirits. Something's happened."

"It isn't me, or the water spirit," Kai said, although he supposed he couldn't be entirely sure of the latter. "I'm trying to discover the cause of your drought. Events like this are happening throughout the islands. I think you must be right, it must be the spirits."

The man seemed a little surprised at Kai's honesty. "Well ... what spirits, then? We offered sacrifices," he gestured behind him. "You can see how well they worked."

Kai hid his horror at the thought of what these farmers' backgarden sacrifices might have entailed-needless death, mangled geas, almost-useless bindings-and attempted to claim that he didn't know anything else.

"There's only two left, though," the farmer said, cutting through his babble of words. "Only two it could be."

Fire and death. The words had chased themselves through his thoughts ever since he had left the water shrine, and all throughout his long walk down the Moka river road. He hadn't even reached the inner temples, and already he had seen more than enough to convince him of his worst fears. The spirits weren't just trying to break free-one of them had already weakened its bonds. The knowledge was enough to terrify the hardiest guardian. Droughts along the Moka, far worse than any for centuries; brackish water and wholesale mandagah deaths in the islands around the death shrine; contagious fevers, of a virulence no doctor had ever encountered, engulfing whole trading villages in the Kalakoas; tide pools on some outer islands mysteriously glowing right before volcano eruptions ... something was happening, something unprecedented for at least half a millennium. Kai's father had refused to consider the possibility. If it had nothing to do with the water spirit, it was none of his concern. Sometimes it seemed that his father really didn't care if millions of people died, like when the wind spirit had broken free. And people thought of him as alienKai shook his head at the irony. They would quake in fear at the sight of his father's cold, fey, utterly inhuman countenance. Or they would have, before Ali'ikai had chosen death.

Fire or death. He had drafted a letter to the new Mo'i of Essel, and he had high hopes that it might yield some results. After all, the Mo'i had just recently been selected by the fire spirit itself. He, more than anyone, might have a clue as to the strength of its bonds. Kai had also written a letter to the death guardian, but he didn't have much hope. By all accounts, Lono made Kai's father look like the soul of human charity. And yet so much of these occurrences suggested the last-bound spirit. But perhaps that was just his prejudice-of the four original bindings, only the death Binder had survived the process. The infamous 'Ana, who supposedly still lived in her tower on the inner island. No one knew how she had bound it; the depth of the mysteries surrounding that most famous of geas had fascinated scholars for centuries. Kai had always wondered how they could trust such a mysterious binding. And after what he had seen on this journey, he couldn't help his suspicions.