The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  She had done all she could to tell him what had happened.

  He lowered his face, resting his forehead on the smooth edge of the chest, digging his fingers into the unyielding wood. He had been careful for himself—changing his appearance, changing his name. But he had not been careful for her or Chokyi. Until the night she confessed her fear, he had not once thought that Râvar might try to get them back.

  He returned to his chair. All night he sat by the open window, the bracelet in one hand, the hairpins in the other. When dawn arrived, he got to his feet and went in search of Diasarta.

  “I don’t know,” Diasarta said in his deliberate way. “Seems pretty thin to me.”

  “No!” Gyalo drew a breath, trying to quell his blazing impatience. “No,” he repeated more quietly. “This is what’s happened. I’m sure of it.”

  “But how many healers are there in Ninyâser?” Diasarta had only just returned from his job as a guard in an all-hours gambling house; he smelled of beer and smoke, and within the wan green nimbus of his lifelight his homely face was weary. They had not seen each other for weeks, yet there had been no flicker of surprise when he found Gyalo waiting for him in the street. “I mean, what are the odds that he could find her?”

  “All it would take is time and questions. How many healers could there be called Axane, with an infant, come to the city only recently?”

  “You really think he wants her back that much?”

  “He was in love with her when they lived in Refuge. Obsessed with her. It never faded, even after she left. It was part of why he … mistreated her, when they were alone in the Burning Land.”

  “No offense, Brother, but he got what he wanted of her then. There’s nothing like getting what you want to cure you of wanting it.”

  “But that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted her to love him.” A sudden vision unfolded inside his mind: Axane under Râvar’s hands. He willed it away. “And there’s Chokyi. His blood, all that’s left of Refuge. Maybe it’s her he wants.”

  Diasarta was silent, fingering the scar that bisected his right cheek, as he always did when he was thinking. A sluggish breeze stirred the air, drawing up a potent whiff of night soil from the alley below the narrow balcony on which they sat. Diasarta’s room was neat and clean, but the rooming house itself, which was much closer to the Nines than Gyalo’s home, was truly squalid—to Gyalo’s Shaper senses even more than to ordinary eyes, for he could see the patterns of rot and shift that had weakened the balcony’s structure, and identify the exact spots where plaster would next crack off the brick. He had urged Diasarta to look for better accommodations; he had even offered to pay for them. But the ex-soldier had refused, just as he had refused Gyalo’s other offers of assistance: clothing, furnishing, the rent on a vendor’s stall when he had briefly tried to set himself up in business as a knife sharpener.

  “You’re sure of this, then,” Diasarta said.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”

  “All right.” Diasarta let his hand fall. “I believe you. What do you want to do?”

  “Go after them.”

  “And how d’you plan on that, seeing as you don’t know where he is?”

  “I know where one of his missionaries is. I can pretend to be a convert. Converts are told how to get to him.”

  “And once you do get to him? What then?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll think of something. rata, Dasa, what should I do? Give up? Let him have her? Sit here in Ninyâser doing nothing while he—while he—”

  “Keep your skin on, Brother.” Diasarta had never been able to break himself of the habit of using Gyalo’s former title. “I’m only trying to get a feel for how I’m going to be spending my time these next few months.” He gave a wry smile. “You do mean me to go with you, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Gyalo admitted.

  “You needn’t look like you just told me to cut my finger off.” There was an edge to Diasarta’s voice. “You know well I’ll follow you anywhere. All you’ve got to do is ask.”

  Gyalo glanced away, at the scabrous wall beside him. It was true. Coming here, he had not expected to be refused.

  “So where is this missionary?”

  “At the Red Lantern Inn, on Shiriya Street in the western quarter.”

  “Bloody ashes, that’s nearly two hours from here. Well.” Diasarta braced his hands on his knees and got up from his mat, favoring the leg he had broken in the Burning Land, which had healed slightly shorter than the other. “We’d better get started.”

  But the missionary was not at the Red Lantern, when they finally found it in the breathless heat of noon. And both the innkeeper and the stable master swore they had never heard of such a person.

  “A holy man?” the innkeeper repeated, as if Gyalo had asked whether he were harboring lepers. “This is an inn, not a temple. That’s the sort of thing puts customers off. I wouldn’t give space to a holy man if he offered me money for it.” He guffawed. “And how likely is that?”

  Gyalo knew he should have expected failure—it was, after all, more than a month since his encounter with the young pilgrim. But the disappointment he felt was crushing. Outside the inn he paused, steadying himself against one of the red-painted columns that flanked the gateway, closing his eyes against the sudden dizziness that gripped him.

  “You all right, Brother?”

  “Yes.” Gyalo straightened. On the column by his hand, a sign to ward off spirits was crudely marked in yellow paint: a hexagon with a squiggle inside it. “Yes, I’m all right.”

  “They may have been telling the truth in there, and they may not. Either way, there’s more to be learned. I’ll poke around and see what I can find out.”

  “There are other inns. We can go street by street—”

  “Brother.” Diasarta wore a determined expression. “I think you should let me do this. By myself.”

  Gyalo felt a flash of anger. Diasarta, who had cared for him like a child during the ordeal of manita withdrawal that followed his escape from Faal, had never quite stopped trying to treat him like someone who needed special care. “I’m as capable as you of asking questions.”

  “That may be. But in a place like this”—Diasarta made a gesture that encompassed the dilapidated neighborhood—not quite a slum but rough enough, the sort of place where canal workers and porters and day laborers lived—“a man like me fits in, and a man like you doesn’t. People will talk to me. They may not to you.”

  It made sense, but in his frustration Gyalo could not admit it. “And what am I supposed to do? Sit at home and bite my nails?”

  “Do your work. Earn your fees. We’ll need money for the journey.” Diasarta laid his hand on Gyalo’s arm. “You go home now, Brother. I’ll come to you tonight and we’ll talk.”

  They parted. Gyalo set out for home, but on impulse turned east along the boulevard that flanked the north side of the Year-Canal. Pedestrians crowded it, and vendors’ stalls, and, at the numerous debarkation points, trains of porters loading or unloading boats.

  He reached the ratist religious complex, a walled compound of monasteries and nunneries and guesthouses and charity houses the size of a small town, and entered the enormous domed bulk of the temple of rata, following the circular outer gallery into the temple’s cylindrical core. The core was dim and cool and smelled of incense and ancient stone. A wave of nostalgia swept him, a vivid sense-memory of the thousands of hours he had spent in temples like it. The secular population was only expected to attend religious services once a week, but daily attendance was required of vowed ratists: Communion in the morning, joyous in anticipation of rata’s return, the Banishing in the evening, doleful in remembrance of his absence. But the rites and observances, devised for the time of the god’s slumber, held little meaning for one who knew rata awake. During his time as a fugitive, Gyalo had come to understand a truth that he once w
ould absolutely have denied: that faith was a thing distinct and separate from the formal apparatus of its expression. It was a long time since he had attended a ceremony, and he owned no devotional objects, not even a string of Communion beads. So much in him had changed these past two years, so many understandings lost and gained; this, which struck at the foundation of the life he had once lived, was neither the greatest nor the most subversive.

  He dropped a coin into the donation box, lit a cone of incense, and settled himself cross-legged on one of the contemplation mats laid out before the colossal image of rata Creator. Hundreds of candles were set in banks about the god’s feet and in trays along the wall behind him; their light shimmered on the gilded pleats of his robes and the golden tresses of his hair, struck sparks from the gems on his brow and the golden sun he held between his great red hands.

  rata, Gyalo thought, gazing into the god’s jeweled eyes, which were trained not on him but on eternity. rata. But his mind would go no further into prayer. Here in the god’s sanctuary, the thought he had struggled all night not to think rose up in him like nausea. Should he perceive more than Râvar’s hand in Axane’s and Chokyi’s abduction? Was it a punishment for his doubt? A spur to the choices he could not bring himself to make?

  He had prayed for a sign. Had it been given at last?

  As usual, he could only guess. No godly intervention was needed to explain the chain of circumstance, rooted as it was in human character and action and entirely human tragedy. All matters of the divine were fraught with this duality—was it the mundane logic of the event that was illusory, or the greater purpose glimpsed shadowy within it?

  Sometimes, though, the imperative was clear. His wife and child had been stolen. They must be rescued. That was the purpose he was following. It was his own purpose; if it were also the god’s, he would trust to time to show it.

  What will come of it, he said silently into rata’s serene and distant face, will come.

  Ciri was sitting at her front door when Gyalo returned home, stringing beans and keeping an eye on her two youngest children, who were tumbling about the court.

  “Is all well with your wife?” she called when she saw him.

  Gyalo had prepared a lie. “I got word last night. She’s gone to visit her sister.”

  “I never knew she had a sister.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  A small pause. “Well,” Ciri said, “I’m glad to know it. I could see you were worried.”

  “Yes,” Gyalo said. He knew her curiosity contained some measure of real concern. “Thank you.”

  He went into his house. The emptiness received him, the horrible silence. He set his back against the door, slid down it to the floor. In the dark of a night that has not yet passed, I reach for you / So I may see your face in the light of a day that is yet to come. It was a verse from the devotional poet Ansi, returning to him as such things sometimes did, remnants of his former life, relics of the scholarship that had once been so important to him. Axane’s face hung before his inner eye, shining as rata’s had, in the temple. All night, Ansi’s lines sang relentlessly through his head.

  In the days that followed, he did as Diasarta had suggested, and devoted himself to work. The monotony absorbed his attention, giving him some respite from the dread, the savage impatience, that otherwise consumed him.

  Each evening Diasarta came to report. They had not seen each other so often since they had come together to Ninyâser. He had found a stableboy at the Red Lantern who was willing to admit to the missionary’s presence, though the boy said the man had moved on three weeks earlier, where he did not know. Since then Diasarta had been going from inn to market to hostel, on the assumption that the missionary had moved to a new venue within Ninyâser, or if not, that there were others like him to be found.

  After Diasarta departed, the emptiness of the house fell on Gyalo like a punishment. That unbearable feeling of restraint, which once had afflicted him when Axane left his side even for a moment, was always with him now; he could hardly breathe for wanting to fall toward her, for knowing he could not. Wherever she was, he knew she dreamed him. Her visions were involuntary, but the bond of love commanded them, like the bond of blood, and just as she had not been able to prevent her sleeping mind from traveling to Râvar, he knew she must be nightly drawn back to him. He sat up past midnight, so her Dream-self would find him wakeful; by his hand he set a sheet of paper, on which he had written in large letters: I know Râvar has taken you. I will follow. He said it aloud, too, the words falling strangely on the quiet air: I will follow.

  On the seventh morning of their absence, Diasarta arrived as Gyalo was loading his cart for the day’s work. Gyalo needed only to look at the ex-soldier’s face to know.

  “You found him.”

  “Yes.” Diasarta was heavy-eyed and unshaven; he must have come direct from work. “I could do with some breakfast.”

  Gyalo brought him to the garden, then returned to the kitchen and with unsteady hands set out cheese and fruit and what was left of last night’s rice on a tray. He went back out.

  “Tell me,” he commanded, setting the tray down with a thump.

  “Food first, if you don’t mind.” Diasarta’s obvious exhaustion rebuked Gyalo’s impatience. He held up his left hand, which was wrapped in a bloodstained bandage. “Cut the cheese, would you?”

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “A keepsake from last night.”

  Gyalo did not question it; the gambling house was a rough place. Unable to keep still, he paced around the garden as Diasarta ate. At last the ex-soldier sighed and pushed away the tray.

  “Come sit down,” he said, “before you wear out those stones.”

  Gyalo did. Diasarta had taken his injured hand in his good one and drawn it close against his body, a gesture Gyalo found oddly familiar. In the bright morning sun, his parched-grass lifelight looked more faded than ever.

  “Yesterday afternoon, a boy came up to me and said that he could take me to the holy man. Naturally I was suspicious, but he led me to the missionary right enough. He was waiting in the basement of one of the hostels. Big, he was, and ugly, with knife scars on his arms and the marks of the prison collar at his neck. He wanted to know why I was looking for him. I said what we agreed. He questioned me a bit, and then he must have decided I was all right, because he began to preach heresy at me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh … that rata had risen at last from his resting place, which was at the heart of the Burning Land in a great cave inside high red cliffs, above a mighty river flowing to the sea—”

  “Refuge,” Gyalo said. “He’s put Refuge into his story.”

  “Sounds that way, doesn’t it. So rata walked the world for a while to see what had become of it while he was asleep. Then he went back into the Land and made the Next Messenger out of flesh, and set divine fire beating in his breast, and gave him a crystal of the Blood and sent him back to the world. Now the Messenger is calling all the faithful, and when there are enough they’ll march on Baushpar and the Messenger will be acknowledged by the Brethren and he’ll lead the Way of rata during the time of Interim.”

  “The time of Interim? What’s that?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. I’d had about as much as I could stand at that point, so I interrupted him—he wasn’t too pleased about that—and asked where I could find the Next Messenger, because I just couldn’t live another minute without knowing how to go to him. He said I should come back at midnight, and if I proved my faith, the way would be given to me. So I did.”

  “You went back? Alone?”

  “I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a trap. Didn’t make sense to set us both at risk.”

  “But, Dasa, we agreed we’d go together!”

  “It seemed best,” Diasarta repeated, “to go alone.”

  With an effort, Gya
lo held his temper. “Go on.”

  “There were about twenty there besides me—men mostly, a few women. All ages—all classes, too. He said we’d shown our faith by coming that far, but now we had to prove it. To be worthy to come to the Next Messenger’s side we must agree to take his mark, as a sign of our belief in him.”

  “His mark?”

  “A slash on the hand. To make a scar, like the ones they say he got from carrying the Blood.”

  Gyalo looked at Diasarta’s hand, cradled in his lap, and realized why the gesture had seemed familiar: the pilgrim boy, who had also worn a bandage across his palm, had held his hands just so. He closed his fingers, feeling the sting of his own scars. “You let them cut you?”

  “It was either that or leave.”

  “Dasa, you should have waited. You should have let me do it.”

  “And what if we never found the man again, Brother?”

  It was true enough. “Go on.”

  “A few left. Most stayed. He had us go up and kneel, one by one. He gave us an oath to speak, and then his man held us down and he cut us. Then he told us the first leg of the journey. At the end of each leg is a way station, where they tell us what the next part of the trip will be. No one knows more than one part at a time, and only those who’ve got to the end of it know it all.”

  “So we don’t actually know where we’re going?” said Gyalo, feeling the familiar frustration.

  “South. For now, anyhow. They call it the Waking Road, the way we’ll be traveling, because we believers are supposed to have woken up. Like rata.” His voice was heavy with disgust. “Here.” He fumbled in his wallet, pulled out a scrap of paper. “There are signs we’re to look for. They mark the turning points, and also the places where pilgrims can get food and shelter.”

  A series of pictograms was scrawled on the paper: a circle with an open eye, a coiled spiral, a crude rendering of a hand slashed by a diagonal line—and one Gyalo recognized, a hexagon with a squiggle inside it, like a flame.