Chapter Twenty-One: Kono
Kono didn’t know what was happening. He should be surfing the waves, maybe fishing, maybe finding a friend for a chilly night. Instead, here he was on the open water with a girl who had sails on her back.
Hepthys sat in the front of the boat, peering off over the horizon. After one night on the open water, a night where neither one of them slept more than fitfully, they set off at first light for Mele.
Kono kept to the currents his tribe was using. They were the fastest, and he smelled the kiss of magic on the air. They were filling their sails and making the water swift and warm. Kono would arrive quickly, but it was difficult to gain on them while using precisely the same engine.
“There!” Hepthys called, her finger searching the horizon.
Kono stood, swinging his body around on the mast. His sheets were filled with wind, and the water whispered by effortlessly. Shading his eyes with one massive hand, he saw what Hepthys indicated.
A spiral of black smoke. Then another. And another.
The closer he got, and the more he saw evidence of what the nations did to anyplace they touched. They had scorched the sea itself.
He spotted the warjunk long before he saw any of the boats of his fellow tribes. The ships of the nationals were wallowing behemoths. In the old stories, it was said the first tribe to see them thought they were floating lodges. The ship was listing badly, a hole opened up in the side, like a ragged, toothless mouth. She was taking water, though not enough to sink her anytime soon. Kono could dimly glimpse people inside, throwing the ocean out by the bucketload.
“Oh, goddess,” Hepthys breathed.
Kono turned his attention to the horizon and saw what she did. He’d been so blinded by the one warjunk, he’d failed to see the true horror. Three more were on the waves, approaching fast. One was enough to conquer a village—four was a force Kono’s mind could scarcely comprehend, and he was looking at it.
As for the fleet of his people, he saw nothing but broken logs and guttering mats of sea fire on the swells. Mele was lost, the force of the tribes was shattered. Kono pulled on the mast, spilling some wind, using the paddle behind him to execute a quick spin, trying to find solace in the simple act of sailing.
“Where are you going?” Hepthys demanded.
“Gettin’ outta here!”
“To go where?”
Kono didn’t respond. he kept his full sheet out, hoping the wind would turn. He turned about when he heard Hepthys whisper some horrified curse under her breath. The damaged warjunk, the one listing dangerously in the seething sea, was lowering smaller boats in the water. Kono recognized them; they were the same vessels that pursued he and Hepthys to the island. A pair of outriggers under a flat deck and a single mast. They were nothing special, but with a full crew of freebooters, all with oars in the water, they could outpace Kono’s little boat.
The two boats hit the water, the nationals leaping into the waves before pulling themselves onto the deck. Only a single figure stood upright on the deck of the lead boat. There was no outline, no comforting humanoid silhouette. It looked to be covered in streamers, all tossed about by the angry wind, a solid rainbow. There was something wrong with the figure’s face, if it even had one, though it was too far to make out clearly.
Kono sat, plunging his paddle in the water. He wasn’t sure where he could go. Small uninhabited islands were everywhere, but the nearest were a day away at least. He could only hope to make the chase too treacherous for the nationals to stomach. It was a foolish hope, but foolish hopes were all Kono had anymore.
The irony was, foolish hopes were all he had even before he left. Against four warjunks, the tribes never had a chance. Escaping his pursuers was equally futile, as these very boats had proven the last time Kono had tried to outrun them.
“We have to fight.” Hepthys’s voice was even. She crouched at the bow of the boat, clutching her spear in one hand. As skillful as she’d shown herself to be on land, fighting on a rocking boat was an entirely different matter.
“No,” he said. “I can get us out of here.”
“How?”
He didn’t want to say it. He would be disobeying Hapua’s commandment to him, using magic selfishly, recklessly, on a plain already prepared by the other ma’hanu. Though they had lulled Kamo’loa to a deeper sleep only recently, the constant pitter patter of magic would stir him from hibernation. Kono would only be adding to the disturbance.
He hesitated, but only for a moment. He stood, planting his feet in the boat, his stance boasting of power. He felt the motion of the swells in his hips, knees, and ankles, making tiny adjustments to maintain his perfect balance. Kono would always be steadier on the waves than on land. There was no give there. He preferred the world in constant motion about him.
He dipped his consciousness below the burning waves. Into the blue, deeper and deeper, until they turned the hue of night. Until the light winked out completely. And then, the only illumination was in the brilliant neons of the deep water life. He only saw them in abstract: a sinuous body whipping past the lights on its flank, a shadow in the oppressive gloom of the water. Still he went deeper.
The gods were of the sea, but they slept beneath it. In great canyons carved into the stygian sea floor, the gods went to where Makaha and the first ma’hanu had banished them. Kono followed the familiar pathways to Kamo’loa. The great mass of glabrous flesh and twitching arms that was the god of his people. An instinctive loathing filled him, a hatred for this being who had tortured and devoured his ancestors. There was no way to destroy the gods; they could only be lulled to sleep.
At least they could be used.
Kono, his body distant at the top of the waves, began to move. He sliced his hands forward, bringing them together, then moving them apart. The power of the god, like a current in the water or a stream of wind, filled Kono’s body. He projected it outward, his movements and words giving it meaning and shape. The water beneath the little boat churned into a current, picking up the little vessel and propelling it forward. The spell lightened his limbs, his blood was wind, his muscles a swift current.
Kamo’loa stirred on the sea floor. Judging by the way the monster’s tentacles twitched against the icy deep sea currents, it was already on the path to awakening. The ma’hanu of the tribe had been using it to fight.
Kono wouldn’t do much. It was the same little deal he made with himself the time he’d used his magic and been banished: He wasn’t using . Just a bit. Not enough to wake the god. Not enough to cause any trouble. Even here, with a pair of nation boats after him, he made that deal in his mind. While he never cared much about making Hapua or anyone else angry, he feared he might disappoint the old man. That was so much worse.
Like water, the power, bright and cold, flowed from the god, into Kono, and into the world around him. Distantly, he felt the wind kissing his face, a sign the boat had picked up speed. He encouraged it, siphoning as much as he dared from the beast. This was the only way he and Hepthys could escape. The only way they could regroup and come up with some kind of plan. He might not be able to think of anything, but maybe Hepthys could. Maybe.
He felt it first as an abrupt lack of pressure. A current going into him—and suddenly not, leaving his body reaching for what had become a lack. At the same time, the wind on his face softened. Kono reached for the current and found it, tracing it to a different place. He leapt into it, following the power with his consciousness.
His eyes snapped open. He turned his head and saw the source.
It was the rainbow shape on the lead boat. Through the ribbon-like cloak fluttering violently in the wind, he saw the figure had taken a stance much like his own. The figure moved their hands in an incantation. The face was , and Kono could see why.
It was a wooden mask, carved into a terrifying countenance, a face almost human and not quite, locked in a saturnine grimace.
This mysterious figure, nearly inhuman, it had hijacked the power…and was using it to power the same incantation. The pursuing boats were moving faster now, Kono’s own vessel becalmed. He’d never heard of anything like this. Why would he? No ma’hanu would wrest the power of the god away from another who had taken it. Wouldn’t keep the god asleep, and so there was no point. None of the tribes would ever take up arms against another. He had heard the freebooters on the island mention their ma’hanu, but he’d dismissed the idea as fanciful. Such a thing couldn’t be imagined.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
But she wasn’t in his imagination. She was real.
He returned to his stance, and tried to grip the current of power he’d only recently held. Tried to return to the casting of the spell that would save him and Hepthys. He found himself dipping in and out of it, like a lona bobbing on the surface of the water. He needed to go below, to once again find his slumbering god, but found he couldn’t. The thought of the Rainbow Ma’hanu, Makani the traitor, pulled him out of his trance every time.
“They’re getting closer!” Hepthys said.
They hadn’t used their slings yet. That meant the crew wanted to capture the two of them intact. Wanted them as slaves. He would have felt better had the stones been clattering off the wooden hide of the boat. The silence was a promise of intent, made worse by the knowledge that they already had any of the survivors of the battle.
Kono closed his eyes, finding his play, attempting to redirect it into himself. It was implacable, as stubborn as the Wai’lani stream, the current that pushed south past Kamo’loa, and with the tendency to greedily snatch unwary boats lingering in it. Redirecting that one would have been impossible without shaking the god awake and making demands. Now he was wrestling with a strength nearly as unforgiving. This time, though, he knew the power on the other end was not the ocean itself, the great mother and connector of the tribes.
This time it was the Rainbow Ma’hanu, the figure of nightmare on the other boat.
He fought the urge, but opened his eyes and looked anyway. What little headway he’d made in struggling with the power was gone, pulled back by his opponent. The Rainbow Ma’hanu looked like a flying thing, the ribbons of her body mimicking the flight streamers of the kalao. He had the impression the nightmare figure could leap into the wind at the first provocation, find the place in the sky that both the streamers and colors demanded. To him, the Rainbow Ma’hanu was far more a creature of the air than Hepthys, the sky-girl.
The boats surged forward. Now, he could make out the pirates’ features. Tiny, grimacing faces, now alight with the opportunity for cruelty. Kono never thought he had it in him to hate anybody, but he hated them for a second, before he turned inward once again to try to wrest control of the current of power. He reached for the one he had, feeling the presence of the Rainbow Ma’hanu out in the dark, ready to snatch it from him. He touched his hand to it—an expression of his will, but his mind gave him the comfort of a body, of hands—and shuddered as the clean power, like crawling lightning, suffused him. Just as quickly, his enemy tore it away, altering the course of the mighty current without any effort.
Kono reached deeper. Tapping another strand of power would be dangerous. The more that were tapped at once, the closer the god grew to awakening, but Kono had no other choices. He reached, found another, flowing from the god in a maddening spiral. He touched it, took what he needed, and continued his spell once again.
Then the presence was next to him again. Suddenly, just there, like a rain-gravid cloud eclipsing the sun. Kono mentally pushed away, focusing his will for combat. Useless. The Rainbow Ma’hanu knocked him aside and seized the stream. Once again, the wind died on Kono’s face.
Hepthys gave a high-pitched cry, and Kono saw her as a predator swooping down from the sky with the ferocity of a lalani coming up from the deep. He opened his eyes, and Hepthys was moving past him, one hand on the mast, the other clutching her spear, balancing precariously on the gunwale.
Kono shifted easily around the other side of the mast. The boat rocked, and for a sickening moment, it looked like Hepthys was about to fall into the water. With the ma’hanu-stirred currents, he didn’t like her chances. Hepthys, though, threw her arms around the mast and dropped into the bottom of the boat.
Kono saw why, when he came to the bow. The national vessels were only a step away. No way to escape anymore. Fighting was the only option. Something Hepthys had realized.
She stood up in the stern, her knees bent in a fighting crouch, spear clutched in her hands. Though she wasn’t much smaller than the nationals, Kono couldn’t help but be nervous, because she was tiny. The smallest friend he’d ever had. Well, that was full grown anyway. Add to that the great, useless sails on her back doing nothing but ruining her balance, and Kono didn’t think she had a chance. Nationals had war in their blood, their bronze weapons built to do nothing but kill and enslave.
The pirates seemed to have the same reaction. A few laughed at Hepthys. Others gaped at her wings, or the sun metal dripping over her body, with naked avarice. To them, she was little more than a potential slave.
The first man to jump over was young, though he already had a nasty scar down the left side of his face, giving him a permanent grimace. He carried a bronze-headed hatchet, the head as scarred as he was. His bare arms were corded with muscle, and he moved with the explosive grace of one used to fighting on the rocking deck of a ship. Kono winced, not certain what he could do in the split seconds he had before the national cleaved into his friend.
He needn’t have worried. The national swung, and Hepthys caught the head of the hatchet under her spear, flicking it into the waves with an expert turn of her wrist. She turned the same motion into a swing, slamming the butt of the weapon across the pirate’s face. He followed his hatchet into the water, surfacing a moment later, but effectively out of the action.
Two more jumped in the boat, and Hepthys dispatched them just as easily. Though her footing was far from secure, her skill with the spear more than made up for it. Both joined their friend in the water quickly, Hepthys sweeping the legs out from one and slamming the other in the chest.
The men on the other boats were wary now.
“Come on!” Hepthys said. “Come on and face me!”
Exchanging nervous looks, they waved their weapons, but it was a hollow threat. They backed away from Hepthys, the youngest of them trembling. They were scared of the sky-girl. She took a step toward them, barely more than a stomp of her foot against the floor of the boat. It rocked, and the men flinched, frightened she might jump over the water and join them there, sending the rest of them into the blue.
On one boat, the men parted. The Rainbow Ma’hanu stepped forward, the streamers fluttering in the wind utterly obliterating any human outline. With the wooden mask, it looked like a demonic head floating on a spray of iridescent water. Hands freed themselves from the fluttering cloak, and now Kono could see feet. Both were horribly scarred, crisscrossed with a million old hurts. Yet the skin was as brown as his. A certain amount of scarring on the hands and feet were inevitable: Kono had a nasty line on his left hand from a fishing spear, and another on the sole of his right foot from a spinefish he’d stepped on. But whoever the Rainbow Ma’hanu was had suffered more than Kono could truly understand. The scars disappeared up into the cloak, and Kono assumed they must continue, graphing a ropy map of pain.
“You then?” Hepthys demanded, her spear spinning restlessly in her hand.
“What are you?” the Rainbow Ma’hanu asked. The voice was higher than Kono would have expected. Softer. Almost motherly.
“I’m your enemy.”
“You’re no tribal. And you come from no nation I know.”
“There are many lands on the sea,” Hepthys said. Kono heard the quaver in her voice at the end. Subtle, but there for one who knew her.
“Where the girls have sails on their backs.”
“They’re !” Hepthys punctuated this by striking a pirate who had been edging closer off his feet. He hit the water with a splash. The injured pirates were swimming for the boats, but the currents both ma’hanu had created pushed the boats resolutely out to sea, beyond the exhausted reach of the men.
The Rainbow Ma’hanu was silent, and Kono imagined her frowning behind the mask. Even that was difficult. Confusion was a human emotion, and there was nothing human about the woman in the cloak and mask. The only human parts of her, the hands and feet, were little more than a web of scars.
“As you say.”
Multiple streams, vibrating currents of lambent energy reached from the depths and twined about the Rainbow Ma’hanu. They came not just from Kamo’loa, but from the others. From Mele, somewhere below, and perhaps from Hakea, from Kokuali, Pua’ui, and the others. The Rainbow Ma’hanu pulled power from whatever gods she wished. Kono saw her as a roiling tempest, crackling with lightning, trailing along the streamers of her cloak. The Rainbow Ma’hanu planted her feet and reached out with one scarred hand, and beckoned.
“Sky-girl!” he called in warning, but it was too late.
The gust of wind buffeted him in the back and he staggered forward, catching himself on the mast. Hepthys stumbled forward as well, her wings acting like the sails she kept insisting they weren’t. The elbows of the wings wobbled in their housings, and Hepthys cried out in pain. The wind tore the spear from her hand and it spun away. The Rainbow Ma’hanu never reacted, but her cohort of pirates hunkered down, covering their heads as they watched the spear flip over them and splash into the water.
Hepthys braced herself, but it was useless. The Rainbow Ma’hanu pushed upward with her magic. Kono felt it beneath their feet, coming up in a waterspout. He reached downward, trying to place himself in the path of the magic. He closed his eyes, projecting his consciousness beneath the waves, where the currents were generated. His consciousness boiled like stormy water; he couldn’t hold onto him. One moment he was there, in the deep water, alongside the slumbering god, where currents of magic surged to the surface, and the next he was on the deck of his little boat, gripping the mast as it was tossed about like a toy. In one of the moments he was where he needed to be, he plunged his hands into the current of power. It burned with ice. He howled as he tried to channel the power away from him, into something else. He couldn’t. There was too much, flooding in from too many of the gods. He might as well have tried to sail on a typhoon.
Kono was thrown aside, his will cast away from the current. He opened his eyes to find his physical body being thrown as well. In the moments between moments he saw his boat capsizing. A fist of water had come up beneath it, hurling the boat into the air, sending he and Hepthys flying, the blue sky and blue water spinning crazily about them. He saw Hepthys only in stuttered seconds, her body limp.
Then the water hit him, a cold shock bringing him back to his senses. The water was the great rejuvenator. He was upside down, but that was nothing to him. He swam downward on a stream of bubbles while above, his boat hit the surface, the water greedily filling it. It would sink, this time permanently. He caught sight of Hepthys, not moving, but near the surface of the water. She looked almost exactly as she had when he had originally fished her from the sea. Her purple wings spread out over the water like guttering sea fire, her body limp beneath.
Kono swept the water behind him with his hands, kicking his feet, as graceful as any fish down there, his eyes preternaturally keen in the water. He surfaced under Hepthys, bringing her up with the natural buoyancy of his body. Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing easily. Her temple was cut, and it looked like a bruise was forming under the skin.
“If it were up to me, I’d kill you.”
Kono looked up. The Rainbow Ma’hanu loomed over him, the boat . The pirates gathered on the edge, their courage now fully recovered since the author of their humiliation was knocked unconscious. They brandished their weapons, the bronze glittering wetly in the sun. Kono remained mostly still, treading water and keeping Hepthys above the rising and falling swells.
“It ain’t up to me,” the Rainbow Ma’hanu finished. “Fish them out of the water,” she said to her men.
The pirates pulled Hepthys from the sea and kept Kono under guard as he hauled himself onto the deck of their boat. Then they bound both Hepthys and Kono, the wet ropes cutting into their wrists.
Kono couldn’t keep his eyes off his nightmare captor. She was implacable, terrifying. And her hatred of him was palpable.