The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  But he had never been skilled at self-deception. The silence he and Axane had built across the past did not banish it, but only made a fiction of the present. Since Chokyi’s birth he had found it increasingly difficult to ignore the artificiality of his life—which was not, after all, a bright new world he had created for himself, but only a wall desperately thrown up in a vain attempt to exclude what lay outside.

  The wall had been breached that evening, by Axane’s revelation of her Dreams. Eventually, perhaps, she would learn the location of Râvar’s stronghold. Another choice would stand before Gyalo then: he who was also a Shaper, who knew what Râvar was and the havoc he intended.

  Fear closed a fist inside Gyalo’s chest. Râvar was hugely powerful, freakishly so. Beside the great wind of Râvar’s shaping, Gyalo’s own ability was a breath, a sigh. Nor had he employed it since his escape from Faal—not once, even in the smallest way. In part this was for fear of discovery. But it was a different fear that really held his ability prisoner—as firmly tethered, in a sense, as it had been when he was still bound by vows and by the Doctrine of Baushpar.

  Did he have to choose? rata had risen. In these last of days, was it still necessary to stand against atrocity? Did even blasphemy matter, at the close of the Age of Exile? Râvar was hidden now, gathering himself like some malignant sickness, but once he emerged the eye of the world would be upon him. Surely, as Axane had said, the King would not tolerate such disruption. Surely Râvar would stumble or go too far, and tear the veil of his deception. He could not succeed. He could not.

  Gyalo’s hands still burned. He opened them, looked down at the white welts that crossed his palms and fingers. The scars were a legacy of Refuge, of the Cavern of the Blood; in his wonder, he had fallen to his knees and touched the crystals, forgetting their razor facets, opening up his flesh. The scar tissue was stiff; he could not completely straighten the fingers of either hand, or close them firmly into fists. It made him clumsy sometimes. But he was still adept enough to write, to lift Chokyi, to touch Axane. To do what was important.

  For a moment, sharply, he recalled the relief that had filled him in his dream, to think he had only imagined the past five years. There had been grief as well. But the relief had been very powerful.

  He bowed his face into his palms. “rata,” he whispered, “risen god of all the world, forgive my hesitation. Forgive my uncertainty. Forgive me for wishing it were easier. I am and always have been your servant. Only let me know what it is you want me to do. Please, great rata. Show me how to choose.”

  The words flew out into the night. Because he was an honest man, Gyalo also heard the words he did not speak, the prayer that lay behind all the rest: Let it not be me. Let it not be me.

  4

  Gyalo

  THE UNSEASONABLE HEAT receded, and the spring rains returned. Gyalo wheeled his cart through wet streets, or worked at home to the sound of water sheeting from the eaves. On a rare day of sun Axane packed a picnic basket and bound Chokyi to her back, and he and she crossed the Year-Canal and spent the day in the grounds of the Hundred-Domed Palace. For centuries the Palace had been the seat of Arsace’s monarchs—and also, briefly, of the Voice of Caryax, who, denouncing the private luxuries of rank and wealth, had excluded himself from such proscriptions, and lived in the Palace exactly like the line of kings he had deposed. When Santaxma reclaimed his throne, he found the Palace well cared for. As a symbol of Arsace’s liberation, he had thrown a portion of the surrounding parklands open to the public.

  Later, Gyalo would recall that afternoon as one of the few bright moments in a troubled time. A tension had come upon Axane since the night she confessed her Dreams, as if the truth had not relieved her of a burden but knotted her up still more. Soon after their picnic, she woke him in the small hours of the night, creeping into his arms and telling him, disjointedly, of dreaming Râvar striding through darkness, preceded by the lightning bursts of shaping and followed by its thunder.

  “He looked at me,” she said, her whole body shuddering. “He looked at me, as if—as if he knew I dreamed him.”

  “No, love,” Gyalo soothed. “He doesn’t even know you’re a Dreamer. You never told him. Remember?”

  “Oh, Gyalo, I’m so afraid.”

  “Sshh.” Gyalo stroked her hair. Rain pattered softly on the courtyard outside. “It was only a Dream.”

  “No—no—I’m afraid he’s coming for me. Me and Chokyi.”

  “Sweetheart, how could he? He doesn’t know where you are.”

  “But I told him!” By her own light, he saw the dread that distorted her features. “In the Burning Land. He asked me what I would have done if I’d stayed in Arsace, if I hadn’t come back to warn Refuge, and I told him, I told him, I said I would have gone to Ninyâser and become a healer!”

  In spite of himself, Gyalo felt a chill. “Axane, even if you said that, he has no way of knowing it’s actually what you did.”

  “But it is what I did, Gyalo! He’s had a year to think about it, about me and Chokyi, about letting us go. A year to decide he should have kept us. You don’t know him—he gets what he wants, he always gets what he wants—”

  “Axane.” Gyalo took her by the shoulders, speaking firmly into her face. “He isn’t searching for you. And even if he were—Ninyâser is an enormous city. It’d be like searching for one bean in a barrelful. He couldn’t possibly find you. You’re safe, my love. Do you hear? Safe with me.”

  She clutched him. “Promise me you won’t do anything foolish.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Promise me! Swear you won’t go in search of him!”

  His hands fell from her shoulders. “Why should you think I’d do that?”

  “Oh, Gyalo!” Her voice cracked. “Don’t pretend! Wasn’t I there in the Evening City when you came before the Brethren? When it was obvious the cause was lost, that they weren’t going to believe you, but you wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t save yourself, because you believed it was your duty? You’re thinking the same thing now, I know you are—you’re thinking that you can learn from my Dreams where he is, and because you’re the only one besides me who knows the truth, it’s up to you to try to stop him. But you have to promise me, you have to swear to me that you won’t try. Because you couldn’t do it! He’s too strong!” Her voice was rising. “Why do you really think I never told you about my Dreams? I knew they’d make you think of this! I knew that if you thought of it, in the end you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from doing it!”

  They looked at each other. In her cradle, Chokyi began to cry.

  “Go to her,” he said.

  She held his eyes a moment longer, then slid off the bed and went to get the baby. Returning, she sat on the opposite edge of the mattress and dropped the shoulder of her bed gown so Chokyi could nurse.

  “You still believe it,” she said into the renewed quiet. “What Teispas believed of you. Don’t think I don’t know.”

  He looked at her, bent over the suckling baby, her heavy hair swept across one shoulder, the back of her long neck exposed. He could have denied it. It would have been at least partly true. But such half assurances were not what she wanted. What she wanted, what she truly wanted, was for him to abandon the question.

  “Axane, I haven’t decided anything.”

  “But you will.” The anger was gone. “I always knew it would be like this. I’ve been pretending it was possible for you to live a normal life. But I always knew …” She sighed. “Promise at least that you’ll tell me. When you do make up your mind.”

  Outside the rain intensified, drumming on the roof. A damp wind breathed through the shutters and died away. Gyalo felt the last vestiges of the happy fiction they had lived these past months go with it. For an instant he was pierced by a terrible grief.

  “I promise,” he said.

  He lay down again. After a little while she jo
ined him, arranging Chokyi between them. The baby slept, but he remained awake, and he thought she did also.

  They did not speak of it again—a different sort of silence than the one they had kept before, not of things hidden or avoided but of things too clearly known. He longed sometimes to break it, to talk with her openly, if not for counsel, then at least for comfort. He loved her, loved her as he had not thought it possible to love anyone. But there were matters between them that were untouchable, and one of these was faith—in particular, his faith.

  Though she had never actually confessed it, he had realized long ago that she did not believe in very much. Mostly, this was a product of her dreaming, which from childhood she had kept secret, in terror of the fate that Refuge forced upon its Dreamers—to spend all their adult lives in sleep, dreaming the Dream-veil that Refuge had believed protected it from its enemies. Not trained to Dream only of Refuge as the other Dreamers were, her sleeping mind had traveled freely across the earth, coming upon the kingdoms of Galea, which according to the heretical philosophy of her people did not exist. She had described to him how these Dream-discoveries had eroded her faith in her people’s teachings, so that by the time he came to Refuge she had rejected nearly every part of their distorted vision of the world. It was this that made it possible for her, alone of all of them, to recognize him not as a Messenger sent by rata or a demon sent by rdaxcasa, but as what he was, an ordinary man. It was this that had driven her choice to return with him and Teispas and Diasarta, in flight from the lie she had lived among her people, in search of a world in which she would not have to hide her gift.

  Her loss of faith in Refuge, he suspected, had damaged her capacity for any kind of belief, just as her long deception had ingrained in her the habit of concealment. But there was also something in her—an obstinacy, an ardent independence, an unwillingness to yield her will to others’—that inclined her more to question than to faith, and compelled her always to go her own way. He could not regret it; those very fierce qualities were part of what had brought him to love her, in defiance of his religious vows. But how then could he talk to her about the questions he could not set aside, the choices he could not find a way to make, his reproachful dreams of Teispas? The anger he had heard in her voice when she accused him of belief, of Teispas’s belief, was always there, waiting. He did not want to confront it. He did not want to argue with it.

  The weather turned fine again, and Gyalo set up his portable desk in the garden on the days he worked at home, sheltered by an awning he rigged from wooden poles and a sheet. He was there one afternoon when there came a knocking on the door. Axane got up from the herb bed she was tending and went to answer. When she did not return, he followed; he did not like to admit it, but since the night of her Dream he had been edgy.

  She was standing in the doorway, one hand on the jamb. The room was dim, the shutters drawn against the heat; against the bright light outside she was a stark silhouette, devoid of detail. “And what makes you think it’ll be a breech birth?” she was saying, as he came up behind her.

  “It’s my wife who thinks it.” The man to whom she spoke was small and weathered, with a garnet-colored lifelight. The collar of his shirt was drawn up over his throat; the toes of his boots, in odd contrast with his shabby clothes, were shod with silver. “Her sister died of a breech birth, and ever since she’s been afraid the same will come on her.”

  “Well, if it is a breech, I can try and turn it.” Axane had assumed her crisp professional manner. “My fee’s ten karshanas.”

  “I haven’t got that much.” The man’s eyes flicked to Gyalo, then away.

  “I see. Well, I don’t work free.”

  “I understand.” He bobbed a bow. “Thanks anyway, mistress.”

  He walked away across the sun-bright court. Axane stood looking after him; not until he had passed into the shadow of the alley did she close the door.

  “You don’t work free?” Gyalo said, meaning to tease her. “Since when?”

  There was an odd expression on her face. “I didn’t like him.”

  “Nor did I. I’ll wager there was a prison scar under that collar.”

  “When I opened the door he stared at me, as if he were, I don’t know, comparing me to something.” She shook her head. “If he comes back, I won’t go. Not even for ten karshanas.”

  “For that price, I don’t think you need to worry he’ll be back.”

  They returned to the garden, where Chokyi lay in her basket in the shade, gurgling and grabbing at her toes. “Little bird!” Gyalo said, and picked her up and swooped her high over his head in the way she loved. She shrieked with laughter, and Axane laughed, too, and they forgot about the visitor.

  Two days later, Gyalo took his cart to the temple of Inriku. He returned near sunset, tired and thinking of his supper. He knew at once that Axane had gone out, for the shutters were drawn, and the door was locked. Inside, the front room was dim, but there was light beyond, in the kitchen—the garden door, hanging open.

  He put down his scribing materials. The clay stove was cold. A pottery dish sat on the table, the bread dough inside it flaccid with overrising. The basket Axane took on healing calls was gone, along with Chokyi’s carrying cradle; the neat array of boxes and bowls and paper packets in which she kept her healing supplies was disordered and pushed about, as if she had rummaged quickly through them. An urgent call, he thought. The open door was strange, though—it was not like her to be careless.

  He closed the door and latched it, then took his scribing materials upstairs. The long room was neat, his desk just as he had left it: nothing out of order. Why should I think that, as if there were a reason something should be? He dropped what he carried on his desk, then ran down the stairs and out into the court again, and knocked at the door of Ciri, the neighbor woman who sometimes kept Chokyi when Axane went out.

  “Did my wife leave word for me?” he asked when Ciri answered, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “No, master scribe. But I saw her go out, just before noon, with the baby on her back and her basket on her arm. I was sweeping my step. I called hello, but she didn’t hear. She was in an awful rush, or at least the men who came to fetch her were.”

  “Men?”

  She nodded. “Two of them.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “I couldn’t say. Oh—but one of them had silver on his boots.”

  “Silver.” Gyalo felt as if a hand had clutched him round the heart.

  “Yes, I noticed it special. Not a thing you often see round here.” She gave him a sharp look. “Is something wrong?”

  “No,” he said, trying to believe it. “No, I just wasn’t expecting her to be out today.”

  He returned to the house. For something to do, he prepared a meal, then sat before it without eating. He thought of the expression on Axane’s face when the man with the silver-shod boots had come to the door, remembered the determination with which she had said, I won’t go with him. Why had she changed her mind? Might she have been coerced? Could that be the meaning of the open door—a sign to him, a signal that she had been taken against her will?

  You’re being ridiculous, he told himself. Why shouldn’t she forget to close the door if it was an urgent call?

  Abandoning the food, he went upstairs and tried to work. But every noise from outside compelled him over to the window, to see if it were she. Finally, he put away his pens and blew out his candles and, drawing a stool to the sill, gave himself up to waiting.

  The hours passed. The moon rose. One by one, the lights that showed through chinked shutters across the way winked out. It was no longer possible to pretend that something was not wrong. She would never stay away so long without sending word. Had she and Chokyi been taken for ransom? It was not inconceivable; scribes could earn a good income, and one of her less reputable customers might have thought to make a profit. Or perhaps
there was some darker reason, something that would not produce a ransom note. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the man with the silver-shod boots at all. Maybe she had met with misadventure on the streets, run afoul of some feud or battle in the Nines.

  Behind these realistic, reasonable speculations, he seemed to hear her voice, urgent in the darkness: I’m so afraid he’s looking for me.…

  No, he thought. It’s not possible.

  But as the night wore on, it began to seem very possible indeed. Why should Râvar not have changed his mind about letting her go—or if not her, the child? Why should he not have remembered what she had told him about Ninyâser? Why should he, or his people, not succeed in finding her, even in the city’s anonymous hugeness—by questioning herb sellers in the markets, for instance, or the craftsmen who made the knives and other instruments healers used? Especially since it had never occurred to either of them that there was any need for her to conceal herself?

  At last he found the courage to rise and go to the chest where she kept her things and Chokyi’s. Inside he found what he had expected, and dreaded, to see: most of her gowns and chemises gone, together with her boots and all of Chokyi’s linens—things that would hardly be required for a healing call or bothered with in a hasty kidnapping, but certainly would be needed for a journey to the mountains. He thought of the disorder of her healing supplies; she must have emptied out her healer’s basket and packed the clothing into it. Her kidnappers had been clever, forcing her to make it seem that she had gone out on a call, so when she failed to return he would assume she was delayed somewhere in the city. But not clever enough to order her to close the kitchen door.

  Or to notice what she had left behind, glinting amid the tumbled clothing that remained at the bottom of the chest: the silver bracelet he had given her on their wedding day, which she never took off, even when she scrubbed the floors. And something else, a pair of hairpins carved from the silky, ash-colored wood of a tree that grew nowhere in Galea except the Burning Land. They were from Refuge, the only mementos she possessed of her vanished people. She wore them daily.