The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  “It’s such a huge deception. Surely at some point he will stumble. Give himself away.”

  “That’s what I’ve been hoping. Arsace was strange to me when you first brought me here, but I was prepared, because I’d been dreaming it for so long. But all he knew was what I told him while we were traveling. At the end … he still spoke as if he thought everything beyond the Burning Land was a realm of demons.”

  “He cannot think that now.”

  “I wish I’d lied when he asked me all those questions. Misguided him. You know how I feel about the Brethren. If it were only them he meant to harm, I wouldn’t care. But there’s everyone else, all the people he’s cheated into false belief, everyone who’ll suffer when he emerges.”

  “You didn’t know to lie. He never told you what he was planning.”

  “I could have stopped him, Gyalo. Bashed his head in with a rock while he slept. I thought of doing it, after …” She bit off the words. “I think I could have. I hated him enough. But then I would have died, too, all alone in the Burning Land without his shaping to make food and water for me. And I didn’t want to die.”

  There was a painful savagery in her voice. Gyalo knew the shadow that lived in her: her grief for her father and for her people, her guilt for what she believed was her part in Refuge’s destruction, her terrible shame and rage at the rape she had suffered at Râvar’s hands. It had changed her. There was a hardness in her that had not been present when he first knew her. It was another of the things they never talked about. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had spoken of the matters they were discussing, or allowed him to speak of them.

  “You didn’t know,” he said again. “Don’t blame yourself for what can’t be changed.”

  “But I don’t want to change it, Gyalo! If I could go back to the beginning and do it all again, I wouldn’t do any of it differently. Because then I wouldn’t have you or the life we have together, here in this world where I don’t have to hide what I am, where I don’t have to pretend to believe in things I know aren’t true. And do you know what that means, Gyalo? It means I wish my people dead. It means I wish my father dead.”

  “Oh, love,” Gyalo said, stroking her hair. “Why do you torment yourself like this?”

  She pulled away from him. “He can’t succeed,” she said. “Something will go wrong. He’ll betray himself. Or maybe the King will act, once he emerges.”

  She did not sound as if she believed it.

  Chokyi woke and began to cry. Axane lifted the baby from the basket and unfastened the pin at the shoulder of her dress so Chokyi could nurse. “There, little bird,” she said. Her downturned face smoothed, grew intent. For a little while Gyalo watched, feeling the odd blend of tenderness and exclusion that always gripped him at such times. Then he got to his feet and fetched his box of writing implements from beside the door, and took a lamp from a side table and went upstairs.

  His desk was not a real desk, but three wide boards that he had sanded smooth, supported on stacks of scavenged brick. Candles stood in pottery saucers—beeswax, not tallow, for their clear smokeless light. He kindled them from the lamp and set to work on his current copying commission. He had worried, when he first took up scribing, that he would find it insupportably dull after the complex duties he had performed as aide to the Son Utamnos. But though he missed the scholarship of his former life—missed it painfully sometimes, especially access to a library—he had learned to appreciate scribing’s lack of challenge: the simplicity of instructions that allowed no latitude, of tasks that required no interpretation, of work that on completion vanished from his life forever. It was even, once he mastered the trick of copying without thinking about the meaning of the words, a little like meditation.

  He sank into the rhythm of the work. The sharp edges of the evening smoothed away. He was aware of Axane moving about downstairs, then nearby. The wash of candlelight shaded green. Warm arms went around his shoulders.

  “Put out the candles, love,” she whispered.

  He snuffed the flames and followed her to the bed. She had left the shutters open against the heat; the moon, nearly full, printed dim bars of silver on the floor. She shone much brighter, a jewel held to the sun—emerald, sapphire, lapis, jade. He fell into her embrace as if into water. The shock of her bare skin against his own was always, somehow, like the first time. Her radiance wrapped him like the currents of the sea, slipping along his body, streaming through his eyes and nose and open mouth, as if for a little while they passed together into a different element and swam tides beyond the world.

  Gyalo was in his office in the Evening City. Lamps burned in niches on the walls; trays of candles danced with flame, illuminating lacquered cabinets and crowded document cases, a pair of iron braziers, his desk strewn with bound books and folios and scrolls. Before him was a sheet of paper; inscribed on it, in the blocky characters of the Chonggyean language to which he had been born, were the syllables of his name.

  He set the brush he held on its stand. He looked down at himself: He wore the loose red gown and trousers of a vowed ratist, and his arms and shoulders were draped with a golden Shaper stole. His scalp was naked, his chin clean-shaven. He could feel the tether of manita, a tight clenching at his center. His vision was the vision of an ordinary man.

  Emotion rose in him, a strange mix of sorrow and relief. “A dream,” he whispered. His journey into the Burning Land, his discoveries there, his apostasy … Axane. All a dream.

  His hand fell to his chest in a gesture of long habit, seeking his simulacrum, the smaller replica of the First Messenger’s great necklace that all vowed ratists wore. But his fingers found only the fabric of his stole. In sudden panic he felt around his neck: It was bare. His simulacrum was gone.

  He rose and crossed his office. The copy room beyond was deserted. He paced between the desks, searching for the gleam of gold. Finding nothing, he left the copy room for the labyrinth of the Evening City, traversing halls and passageways, courts and galleries, rooms and suites and reception chambers. His simulacrum was nowhere to be found. In all that vast and magnificent space, there seemed to be no living soul except himself.

  He came at last to a passage with walls of rough red stone. The air smelled familiar—of dust, of dryness, of rock cracked by the hammer of the sun. Beneath it, faintly, he caught the aromatic scent of … bitterbark? And suddenly a searing wind struck him and he was in the Burning Land, red soil and gray-green scrub spreading out forever beneath a harsh cobalt sky. The sun drilled down like an auger; his shadow was the merest puddle at his feet. The air was almost too hot to breathe.

  Ahead he saw a human form, distorted with distance and the metallic tides of heat. He started toward it, his feet catching in the low vegetation. It waited, unmoving; he could see its ragged garments, its tangled black hair. There was something deeply familiar in that straight, square-shouldered stance. All at once he knew; and with that recognition, they were face-to-face.

  “Teispas,” he said.

  The captain smiled. He looked as he had during their ordeal in the Burning Land: dark skin scabbed and peeling with sunburn, hawk face half hidden behind a bush of beard. He held his cupped hands toward Gyalo. Fire flashed upon his palms.

  “I’ve been saving it for you,” he said.

  It was the lost simulacrum. Gyalo reached to take it. But the sun-heated metal scorched his fingers, and he gasped and dropped it. It fell more slowly than was natural; he could count each link of the gold neck chain, each wire of the golden cage suspended from it, each facet of the glass jewel the cage contained, each swirl of the iridescent metal at the jewel’s heart, cunningly crafted to mimic the true Blood’s core of living flame. It struck the ground, sending up a little puff of red dust.

  “You must pick it up,” Teispas said.

  An immense weariness swept over Gyalo. The brilliant world around him seemed to dim. �
��But it’s only a copy.”

  Teispas shook his head, as if in disappointment. The wind lifted his hair and tossed it across his face.

  “Teispas—” Gyalo realized he was dreaming. The grief that filled his throat came from his waking self, rising out of sleep. Still he said the words he always said, for dreams were the only place in which Teispas heard them: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Teispas’s face was drawn in lines of agony. He turned. His tunic was torn; Gyalo saw the marks of the lash, weals that opened to the bone.

  “Teispas,” he called. “Teispas—”

  And he was awake.

  The scars on his hands throbbed, as they did when he grew agitated. Tears had tracked from the corners of his eyes into his hair. He rubbed them away and sat up. The bars of moonlight on the floor had barely moved. Axane lay huddled on the edge of the bed, wreathed in shifting color.

  He pulled on his trousers and checked on Chokyi, and padded down the stairs by his own pale light. In the kitchen he drew a dipper of water from the cask and drank, then unbarred the door and went out into the garden. It was a tiny space, enclosed by walls of the same yellow brick as the house. Axane had dug herb beds, and with typical enterprise had traded healing services to a mason for a stone path with a little paved rectangle at its midpoint, on which sat a wooden bench. The mason had pounded the earth and laid a bed of gravel so the stones would sit firm—to the ordinary eye a neat and pleasing work, but to Gyalo’s Shaper senses riven with imperfection, for he could see the stress lines where the stones would eventually crack, the areas of instability where they would rise and shift, and of course the patterns of their being, which told him not simply what kind of stone they were, but how they had been formed and how they would decay and how he might, if he chose, transform them into something else or even banish them entirely. Nothing in the world was static; everything, at every moment, held within itself the whole cycle of its growth and dissolution, every possibility of metamorphosis and destruction.

  He sat on the bench and rubbed his palms together, trying to soothe the ache. Nearby the herb plants shed their little lights; the moon looked down, its face almost the exact hue of his own radiance, and the air stirred with the rising heat of stone and brick and tile. Beyond the quiet of the enclosure, he could hear the sporadic night sounds of Ninyâser: shouting, someone tossing liquid out a window, the barking of dogs.

  Often when he could not sleep he sought the calm of meditation, one of the few habits he retained from his monastic days. He knew better than to try that now. In the humid city darkness, he could almost catch the arid whiff of stone and dust and bitter herbs that was the odor of the Burning Land. The moment he closed his eyes, he would see Teispas’s bloody back again.

  He did not know if Teispas had died of the lash. But he did know that the captain had perished in captivity in King Santaxma’s dungeons in Ninyâser, long before Râvar came out of the Burning Land. It was Diasarta who discovered this, over the course of many months of patient inquiry and a small fortune paid in bribes.

  “You didn’t really think we’d find him alive, did you?” Diasarta had said when he came to give the news. “You had to expect this.”

  Gyalo had. But, sitting stunned with grief and guilt, he found it made little difference.

  “It isn’t your fault,” Diasarta said. “He chose to stay.”

  “I should have known. I should have done more to make him go.”

  Diasarta shook his head. “He’d never have left you.”

  Gyalo knew it was true. In his mind’s eye, he saw the series of events he had not witnessed, but had conjured so many times in imagination it almost seemed as if he had: Axane and Diasarta, crawling after Teispas across the Evening City’s maze of interconnected roofs. Teispas, balanced on the ridge-line where the roofs butted up against the outer wall, lowering a rope for the other two to slide down; then, having secretly made up his mind not to accompany them, starting to draw it up again. Diasarta, realizing his intent, leaping instinctively to grab the rope, causing Teispas to slip. The crashing of loosened roof tiles in the court below; the alerted servants, the summoned guards. And, grafted seamlessly to this parade of invention, the moment for which Gyalo had actually been present: Teispas, bound and bruised and on his knees before the leader of the Brethren, declaring that he and Diasarta and Axane had plotted alone to escape Baushpar, and Gyalo was ignorant of their plan. When in fact it had been Gyalo, realizing too late that the Brethren suspected them all of heresy, who had ordered his companions to go.

  “It’s funny, y’know,” Diasarta said. “He was such a bloody arrogant man. There were times in the Burning Land when I hated his guts. Even later on I can’t say I ever really got to like him.”

  Gyalo nodded. He had felt much the same.

  “But we were part of something, y’know? What we went through in the desert … it binds you, a thing like that. rata help me, I grieve for him the same as for my brother. And I loved my brother.”

  Axane and Diasarta had not been recaptured, though the Brethren had searched for them. Teispas was hauled off for interrogation by the King, who dreaded heresy as much as the Brethren did, if for different reasons. Gyalo was sent into imprisonment, both for his apostasy and (he realized only later) for the sake of the Brethren’s fear of him. And the Brethren purchased an army from Santaxma, and dispatched it into the Burning Land to obliterate the people of Refuge. Thus, in grief and bloodshed, ended the task that Gyalo had believed, then, had been given him by rata himself: to bring news of the god’s rising to the Brethren and prepare them for rata’s return.

  Now, amid the quiet garden, a different memory swept him, its gem-bright immediacy undiminished by the years that divided it from this moment: Teispas, mantled in the cobalt firelight that had been absent from Gyalo’s dream. Teispas’s voice, harsh in the inhuman silence of the desert night: You really don’t see it, do you. That you are the Next Messenger.

  Gyalo drew a breath, shuddering. For four years those words had overlooked his life. While he lived, Teispas had not allowed Gyalo to forget them. Dead, he came in dreams, to insert into Gyalo’s sleep the reproaches he could no longer utter in waking time.

  Gyalo had turned from him that night in horror, hardly able to believe that Teispas, that hard and pragmatic man, could make the same error the people of Refuge had. But though the hubris of it stopped his breath, he could not entirely deny the pattern Teispas saw: the message he bore, the Blood he carried, exactly as foretold in rata’s Promise. Over time he came, struggling, some way toward belief. But beyond the thought-twisting isolation of the desert, what had seemed terrifyingly possible—or at least, not entirely deniable—became preposterous. Who was he to name himself the god’s herald? He carried news of rata’s rising, yes, but by chance discovery, not divine revelation. The Blood had not been given him by rata, but by Axane, who had pilfered it from the Cavern. How could he, a mortal man, accomplish what the Next Messenger must accomplish—open the way, whatever that meant, and bring an end to the Age of Exile? Where were the acts of destruction and generation that were supposed to follow on the Next Messenger’s arrival? To understand those things was like waking from an awful dream in which he had forgotten who he was. By the time he reached Baushpar, he had rejected any significance in the manner of his return—though Teispas and Diasarta, for all his efforts to dissuade them, suffered no such change of heart.

  He had known the Brethren would imprison him. Even if they had believed him, it was the sentence for apostasy, an inevitable consequence of his return. He had not imagined any possibility of reprieve. But then, incredibly, the chance for escape had come—in the form of Diasarta, who tracked him to Faal, the isolated monastery where he was confined. Teispas’s pattern had seemed to flicker again, like lightning along a far horizon: rata’s hand reaching into his life once more, offering a second chance. In dread and obedience he had embraced freedom, finally
and forever renouncing the church and its strictures on his shaping, transforming himself thereby into the thing he had been taught all his life to know as anathema: a true apostate, an unbound Shaper whose liberty had not been forced, but chosen.

  Uneasy in his liberty, he waited for a sign, some confirmation that his choice had been correct. Great rata, he prayed, am I your Messenger? What is my duty? What must I do? rata awake was as silent as rata sleeping; it did not entirely surprise him that no answer came. Yet during the bitter days of his imprisonment he had come to doubt nearly everything he had done or chosen, even whether rata had meant him to bring word to the Brethren; and while this made clear to him the risks of human assumption—including doubt—in matters of the divine, it left him little certain ground on which to stand. So much in him had shifted: his altered view of the Sons and Daughters he once had served so faithfully, his changing comprehension of what his time among them had really been meant to accomplish, his stumbling sense that the church’s control of shaping—whose necessity he had once accepted as he accepted the rhythm of his own pulse—was in some deep way mistaken. Free for the first time in his life, he found himself unable to move forward, either to take the final step into belief or turn his back upon the question once and for all.

  Then Axane dreamed her way back to him—as he had hoped, but not quite dared believe, she would—and in the joy of their reunion he forgot the questions for a while. It had really seemed, in those early days, that they might set the past aside and date their lives from the moment of their marriage—as if that had been the point, as if all the suffering and betrayal and destruction had been meant only to bring the two of them together. At last, Gyalo told himself, he would set duty aside. He would be an ordinary man—a husband, a father, a scribe, rising each day to go to his work, returning nightly to his family. From these simple actions he would build a life. When, at its end, he looked back upon the events that had terminated his ratist service, he would find them as strange and unlikely as a dream.