I was sorely tempted to respond—to remind him that it was his overweening political ambition that first alienated Santaxma, and that Santaxma would not be defiling the Burning Land if we had not allowed it. More—that by our sanction of the King’s mining we have opened the door to the private prospecting of the Land by individuals and cartels that no longer fear a charge of blasphemy. Even before our demon’s bargain with Santaxma, our censure meant little in the world beyond the church—the Lords’ Assembly certainly did not heed it, when the issue of mining first arose. Now it means absolutely nothing. But what would have been the point? Taxmârata knows these things as well as I.
“Do not mistake me,” Taxmârata continued. “I do not say we could have acted differently. We have no military capacity—we needed Santaxma’s soldiers to march on Refuge, to round up its heretics and destroy its apostate Shapers. We needed shaping power of our own, so the army could survive the Land. So we paid Santaxma the price he demanded for his aid, trusting that rata would understand our need, and we released twenty-five Shapers from the tether of manita. Darknesses, yes—but necessary, unavoidable. Yet from them, what unintended darkness flowed! Not just Refuge’s Shapers slain, but all its people killed. Dâdar’s and Vivaniya’s deception—as terrible a thing as any of us has ever done.” He took a step toward me. “I sense that this burdens you, Sundit, as it burdens me. I haven’t forgotten that we were, once, much of a mind.”
This time my anger would not allow me to keep silent. “It does burden me, Brother. But my regret is not like yours, for I would not have made the choices you made. I would not have bargained with Santaxma. I would not have paid his blasphemous price. I would never have chosen Dâdar to go into the Burning Land! This I tell you—if I had been Bearer when Gyalo Amdo Samchen returned, we would not now be in this plight!”
A thousand times I’ve thought this. Not once have I ever said it. I vowed long ago that I would not remind him of the sacrifice I made for his sake, and I’ve kept that vow, until tonight. It struck him, for a moment, entirely to stillness. The moonlight falling on his face made it seem carved from stone.
“Other things might have been different,” he said finally. “But not the mission on which we sent Gyalo Amdo Samchen, or the news he brought back, or the dissension it seeded among us. And even if you’d found another way to raise the army, Sunni, you’d still have had to free the Shapers. You’d still have had to incur that darkness.”
I said nothing, for I knew he was right.
“We sent Gyalo Amdo Samchen into the wilderness.” He looked away from me, at the ghostly reaches of my garden. “But I have begun to wonder whether … whether another’s hand might have sent him back. Whether rata intended him to test us.” He drew in his breath. “Whether we failed that test, by turning from his words.”
I stared at him. I could not speak. He turned toward me again. I saw, with astonishment, that his eyes were full of tears.
“The past can’t be undone,” he said. “But I’ve been wrong to distance myself from you. I would change that, when you come back. If you will allow it.”
The turmoil of emotion that gripped me is impossible to describe. Anger, yes. Bitterness. But also my love for him, which has not been destroyed, but only buried, by all that has gone wrong between us in this life.
“We shall see.” I wanted to reach out to him, but my pride would not allow it. “When I come back.”
A pause. Then he nodded. “Safe journey, Sunni.” He made the sign of rata. “Great is rata. Great is his Way.”
“Go in light, Mâra.”
It slipped out without my willing it, the pet name I haven’t used in … how long? Years. The corners of his mouth curved into the smallest of smiles. He mounted the steps and passed into shadow. I saw the pale glimmer of his stole as he moved along the gallery.
I returned to my chamber. Ha-tsun had already completed my packing; there was nothing left for me to do but write in this journal, which I was too weary and unsettled even to contemplate. I got into bed and tried to sleep. I was still awake when Utamnos came pattering in and crept beneath my covers.
“Did you have a bad dream, little mouse?”
“No.” He huddled into my arms. “I don’t want you to go away, Sister Sunni.”
“I don’t want to go either, little mouse. But I have to.”
“Why?”
“Our spirit-brother Taxmârata has given me an errand. And we must all obey the Blood Bearer, mustn’t we?”
He wriggled in a way that conveyed his disagreement. “Tell Sister Hysa to go.”
“Hysa has to stay here and take care of you. You’ll like staying with her and Rukhsane.”
“Don’t want to stay with her. Want to stay with you.” He began to sob. “I want my mother! I want to go home!”
“This is your home now, little mouse. This is your family.”
“No,” he wept. “No.”
I held him as he cried himself to sleep. My heart ached for him—the fear and homesickness of my own first months in the Evening City are still very vivid to me. Of course, I was five when I was identified in this incarnation; it’s much harder for the older ones. Utamnos is only two and a half. In a year he will not remember any other life.
Hysanet came at dawn to take him. We departed without incident—Vivaniya and I in our separate coaches, with one aide and one body servant each, our guards riding alongside—twenty of them, ten from my guard and ten from Vivaniya’s, with my Reanu in command. The agent who returned last month from the claimant’s stronghold is also with us; he will serve as our guide. We do not move by easy stages, but hasten forward with all the speed we can—already we have nearly reached Ninyâser, a journey that normally takes closer to two weeks than one. Fearing for our safety south of Darna, where many of the bandit bands that harass the Great South Way are former Caryaxists, Reanu has caused the insignia on our carriages to be painted over. From the presence of the Tapati, whose face and arm tattoos proclaim them the legendary guardians of the church, it is apparent that we are high-ranking ratists. But it will not be guessed that we are Brethren.
Taxmarata’s words travel with me. I have begun to wonder whether Gyalo Amdo Samchen was sent to test us … How much his heart must have changed, to say such a thing! I have been remembering our friendship—how, at thirteen, he sought me out and became my protégé, despite the displeasure of his spirit-guardian Ariamnes, that pompous pedant. How I taught him to share my passion for reform: the abolishment of taxation to support the church, the reversal of the Way’s long indifference to the scientific and mechanical arts, the promulgation of new doctrines to address the perennial affliction of greed and graft within our monasteries and nunneries. How I stood aside when the office of Blood Bearer became vacant, supporting his candidacy instead for the sake of his bond with Santaxma. How after he was elected, political ambition seized him, driving him to the errors and miscalculations that have so divided us from the King, who now pays the barest lip service to the church without which he could not have gained his throne. Thus died the dream I had thought Mâra and I shared, of a Golden Age for the church in a newly liberated Arsace.
Do I want to be his ally again? I don’t imagine he intends to recommit himself to those bold reforms. It’s too late, in any case: Even had Santaxma not turned against the Way, reform could only have been accomplished had we pursued it from the start, when Arsace still stood between the travesty of governance imposed by the Caryaxists and the inevitable reassertion of the ways of life and rule that gave rise to the rebellion. Also, these past years have greatly changed my view of him. In all his incarnations he is a formidable man—a powerful personality, an incisive intellect. But in this body he is also vain and excessively ambitious. And there is brittleness to his will. With the weight of twelve hundred years of life behind him, he could not stand against Santaxma. Though in truth, not many could.
I canno
t read in the jouncing coach, for it makes me ill, and neither Ha-tsun nor Drolma have much gift for conversation. So I am alone with my thoughts. I pick at them, turn them round and about inside my head. Even as I do, I’m aware of their fragility. For under them, like bedrock beneath a scattering of topsoil, lies the purpose of this journey, and the truths—or falsehoods—we will discover at its end. Will I be able, afterward, to return to these musings of mine? Will I want to?
Vivaniya and I don’t speak of this. We see one another only in the evening, when we are weary, and in the morning, when we are half-awake. When we talk, it is of practical matters. But I can see his eagerness. I can feel his impatience.
Twice now I’ve dreamed of a desert, red and empty like the Burning Land. At the horizon a light rises up, as if a fire were raging somewhere far below. My dream-self walks toward it, walks and walks, but the light never nears. When I wake, I feel a pressure in my chest, as if a great hand were closing there. It’s always a moment before I can breathe again.
6
Râvar
SHE ARRIVED AT night.
Râvar was just rising from his bath. When he heard the sound of summons, a rhythmic booming from a stretched-hide drum at the entrance to his quarters, he almost did not go out. But there had been clashes recently between his hunting bands and the nomad tribes that roamed the great grass steppes below the caverns, and it was possible that the matter was urgent. He wrung out his hair, then crossed swiftly to his bedchamber and pulled a long tunic over his nakedness. Settling the Blood of rata around his neck, he went to see what was wanted of him.
In the first of the four rooms of his private domain, beyond which none of his followers were allowed to go, Ardashir stood waiting. At his side was a weathered man with a garnet-colored lifelight. Râvar felt his heart stop, then leap forward at twice the speed. The man was Zabrades, one of four who had been sent to Ninyâser, months earlier, to search for Axane. Both men bowed.
“Well?” Râvar said.
“Beloved One.” Ardashir’s bandaged hands were clasped before him. A complex and forceful man, he owned one of the weakest lifelights Râvar had ever seen, no more than a shadowy blue flickering at the margins of his body. In bright illumination, it was barely visible. “The woman and her child have arrived.”
It was not possible, for a moment, to speak. Râvar put his hands behind his back and paced to the dais at the center of the room, where a massive chair of translucent quartz thrust seamlessly out of the red-orange sandstone. He seated himself and shook back his wet hair. “Why have you not brought them?”
“Zabrades begged leave to speak with you first, Beloved One.”
“Oh?” Râvar turned his eyes upon the other man.
“Beloved One.” Zabrades bowed again. He was one of the First Faithful, part of the band of prisoners who had seen Râvar bring down the walls of Thuxra City. He wore nomad clothing, one of several things that distinguished the First Faithful from Râvar’s other followers; at the base of his throat was a puckered band of scar tissue, the mark of the prison collar he had worn for seventeen years before Râvar set him free. “The woman is well. The child is well. But I wanted to prepare you.”
“Prepare me for what?”
“Beloved One, we didn’t have any trouble at first. When Sariya and I showed up to take her, she didn’t even act surprised. It was almost like she was expecting us.”
Râvar closed his ruined hands on the arms of the chair. As she had possessed his thoughts this past year, he had owned hers. As he had come to realize he had been wrong to let her go, she had grown to understand that he would reach out and take her back. He had hoped it would be so.
“But once we got on the road, she did all she could to delay us. She said she was sick, said the baby was sick, pretended she’d turned her ankle. Every chance she got she tried to give us the slip, and she didn’t take kindly to being caught—she nearly broke Sariya’s nose one time, for all she had the baby on her back. We had to do something, for her safety and the child’s. We couldn’t tie her hands, since she needed them for the babe, so what we did—well, what we did, we put a leash around her neck. We padded it as best we could. But it left a mark, Beloved One.”
“A leash,” Râvar repeated. How she must have hated that.
“Yes, Beloved One.” Zabrades drew a breath. “It was me made the decision. If there’s punishment coming, it’s mine.”
“No, Zabrades. I’m not angry. You did what you had to do to fulfill the task I gave you. There’s no blame to that.”
“Beloved One.” Relief was clear on Zabrades’s face.
“Did she speak to you as I said she might?”
“She cursed us, Beloved One, especially at the start. Apart from that she hardly opened her mouth at all, except to eat.”
Râvar had struggled with what to tell them when he sent them out for her. His first thought was to concoct some sort of mythic tale on the order of the stories he had already invented. As rata had created him to be the Next Messenger, the god had created Axane to be his wife and companion during his sojourn upon the earth. During their wanderings in the desert they had conceived a child. But in the aftermath of Thuxra they were separated, and she, fearful and confused, wandered off and vanished—lost forever, he feared, until merciful rata granted him a dream of her, so he might send his followers to find her and return her to his side.
Such a story had no place in the legend of the Next Messenger. But he had already considerably altered the legend, and had little fear of his followers’ doubt—for he knew that they were drawn to him not simply by belief, but by the desire to believe, and that this gave them an almost infinite capacity for acceptance, as long as he was careful not to contradict his own inventions. In the end, though, he decided on something less elaborate. If things went wrong—and he knew they might go very badly wrong indeed—fewer details would mean less need for justification. He had informed Ardashir simply that there was a woman and a child in Ninyâser whom he wanted found and brought to him, and ordered the First Disciple to arrange it. Hoping she would come willingly, aware she might not, he had told Zabrades and the others that her mind was disordered, that she might try and tempt them from their faith with lies. He saw the curiosity in their faces, but, obedient, they did not ask. It was not their place.
Ardashir, of course, believed his place was different. He accepted the unexplained instructions without comment, but Râvar felt his jealousy, and, a few days after the First Faithful departed, he came to ask the questions Râvar had been expecting: Who were the woman and her child? What were they to the Messenger? Râvar stared at the First Disciple until he dropped his eyes, then told him, gently, that he must wait to learn, and that all would be made clear in time. Ardashir had not quite been able to conceal his frustration, but since then had said nothing more.
“Was it difficult to find her?” Râvar asked.
“Not so much, Beloved One. Healers in Ninyâser aren’t supposed to work unless they’re registered, and they can’t register unless they’ve done a full apprenticeship and have papers. We knew she couldn’t have come by those the proper way, seeing as how you told us she was new to Arsace, so we figured she’d either have gotten the papers forged, or she’d be working unregistered. Plenty do. Merchants don’t like the unregistered ones, and there’s only so many places they can get the herbs and other things they need—all we had to do was ask around. Took less than a week. We watched the house and waited till her husband went out, then we came back for her and the child—”
“Her husband?”
Zabrades faltered. “Yes, Beloved One. She’s married. A foreigner from Chonggye, a scribe. His name’s Gyalo Timpurin Chok.”
Râvar sat motionless. Gyalo. It was what the false Messenger had been called. He, too, had been from the kingdom of Chonggye … No. No, it was not possible. Besides, the false Messenger’s other names had been different. It had
to be coincidence, that first name.
But a husband …
“Beloved One?”
Râvar forced his attention back to the men before him. “You’ve done well, Zabrades. I’m pleased. Come, I’ll give you blessing.”
Râvar held out his hands. Zabrades came forward, and knelt to kiss the scarred palms.
“Child of rata. For your duty, gratitude. For your labor, rest. For your soul, light.” Râvar touched the forefinger of his right hand to Zabrades’s forehead. A small point of brilliance blossomed there. “In my father’s name and mine, in the name of the time to come, I give you blessing.”
Zabrades shuddered. Blinking rapidly, he rose and bowed. “Beloved One.”
“Ardashir, bring them to me. See I am not disturbed again.”
“Beloved One.” Ardashir bowed also, though not quite so low—one of the privileges he claimed as First Disciple. He took Zabrades’s arm, guiding him from the chamber.
Râvar left the reception chamber for the chamber beyond. A fire burned in a bowl-shaped depression he had shaped into the floor. Around it, six curved benches made a circle. He sat down on one of them, his hands clasped between his knees. Irrationally, in the fulfillment of the moment for which he had waited so long, he found himself wishing it either past or yet to come. A husband, he thought. He breathed deeply, striving for calm.
There was no sound. But he sensed a change and looked up. She stood in the chamber’s entrance—a small woman, enclosed in an astonishing cloud of emerald and sapphire light. The sight of her struck him like a fist. Emotion flooded him. It felt like anger, like regret, like desire, like grief, like guilt, like need—like all those things, and none of them. For a moment, he could not breathe.
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