The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  Carefully, he got to his feet. She stood motionless as he approached, but he saw the tensile quality of her stillness, like an animal about to bolt. She was slim, as he remembered, but her face and breasts were fuller. The pregnancy, he thought. She was trembling—or perhaps only shivering, for the caverns were chilly. He had prepared a speech, but could not recall a single word.

  “Axane,” he said.

  Her nostrils flared. Every muscle in her body seemed to leap.

  “Don’t be afraid of me.”

  She stared at him. It was unexpectedly uncomfortable to be enclosed in such a gaze: the gaze of a person who knew exactly who he was. Not since he let her go had anyone looked at him that way. His eyes fell from hers, to her neck, where bruises lay dark on the dark skin.

  “I’m sorry.” He resisted the impulse to reach out and touch the injured spot. “That they had to bind you.”

  “I gave them no choice,” she said in a low voice. Then: “Why have you brought me here?”

  How can you ask? “I want you with me. I want our child.”

  She took a step back, her hands rising to the straps of the pack she wore—which he saw now was not a pack, but an infant’s carrying cradle. “I thought you hated me,” she said. “I thought you were glad to be rid of me.”

  “No. Never.” He knew what had to be said, and forced himself to say it. “I wronged you. In the Burning Land. Whatever else—whatever else there was between us, I shouldn’t have done to you what I did.” He closed his eyes, convulsively, remembering. “I never knew I had such baseness in me, Axane, before that night. I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”

  She watched him. He could read nothing in her expression.

  “I wish I could undo it. I wish that with all my heart. But I can’t. I can only ask for your forgiveness. I love you, Axane, I’ve always loved you. You and I are the last of Refuge. We are all who remember it, all who grieve for it. There are terrible things between us, but we have both come so far, we’ve both lost so much. We share things we can never share with others. How can we be apart?” He willed into the words all the force of which he was capable, all the art of persuasion he had honed and perfected during the time of his deception. “However it was conceived, this is my child. My flesh, my blood, the only kin I have left in all the world. How can we not become a family, the three of us, you and I and our child?”

  “A family,” she repeated.

  “If you ask it, I’ll swear never to lay my hands on you again. But I want you with me, you and our child. It’s hard … it is very hard … to be alone.”

  “But you’re not alone. You have all this.” She made a gesture, encompassing his chambers and everything that lay beyond them. “All these people who believe in you.”

  “But they’re not my people! I share no history with them, no memories, no blood. You know what that means, I know you do. Haven’t you longed for your own kin, your own kind? I know you can’t be happy, all alone in this world you weren’t born to—”

  But she had not been alone. In the shock of seeing her, he had forgotten.

  “What does it matter?” she said, out of her frozen face. “When has what I wanted ever mattered to you?”

  In more than a year, not one person had dared speak to him so. Anger flared, the anger that had done so much damage between them. He breathed it away. It’s her fear, he told himself; then, deliberately, probing the wound: To which she is entitled.

  He had known her, growing up, as everyone in Refuge knew everyone else: the daughter of Refuge’s leader, the child of her father’s heart, a quiet girl who seemed somehow to be alone even in the company of other people. She was not pretty—slim as a reed, dark-skinned, her black hair too heavy and her brown eyes too large and her nose and mouth too proud. But then his shaping manifested, and he saw suddenly that she was beautiful—beautiful in a way only a Shaper could understand, beautiful in her jewel-colored light. The contrast between her lifelight’s rich abandon and her own tight self-containment entranced him. How could so much light boil from so drab a woman? Surely she must hide some great secret, some seething passion, at the center of her soul.

  Of course, as he was to learn, the qualities of lifelights were random, and reflected people’s natures no better than their faces or their bodies did. Yet that first fascination never waned, and as he watched her going quietly about her business he grew convinced that the bland face she showed the world was a mask across a very different self. As soon as he was old enough, he began to woo her. He did not care that she was four years his elder, or that his friends thought her dull and ugly. He did not care that she rejected him, over and over, with a stubbornness that only proved what he already knew: She was more than she seemed. Concealed inside this yielding woman was a will of iron. He knew that he would win her. He was strong, and beautiful, and would one day be Refuge’s Principal Shaper. It needed only time.

  In the end his patience had run out. He turned to her father, who was only too pleased to order his stubborn daughter to accept such a prestigious match. It had not seemed to matter that her consent had been coerced—he had been that certain, once she was in his arms, that he could make her love him. But then the false Messenger, Gyalo Amdo Samchen, arrived in Refuge, and when he fled, she fled with him—a double betrayal, not just of Râvar and the love he had laid at her feet, but of Refuge, which he loved even more. He had not known it was possible to feel such pain. It enraged him that he could not cut her from his heart; it incensed him that he could not keep from dreaming her, and from desiring her in his dreams. He had punished her for that, in the aftermath of Refuge’s destruction, as they traveled back across the Burning Land—punished her also for the truth he finally understood: that she had never believed in Refuge. That was the secret hidden inside her light: She had no faith. By then, of course, he had no faith either. He punished her for that as well, for his own unbearable grief and guilt, plumbing as he did the depths of a baseness he had not known was in him.

  It was why he had set her free, just before he destroyed Thuxra City—as atonement, and also to ensure the survival of some piece of himself, through the child he knew she bore. But in the time that followed, in the loneliness of his sojourn among strangers, he had come to regret that decision. The ugliness between them grew dim. All that seemed to matter was the heritage they shared, and his own blood flowing in the child. She had betrayed him. He had wronged her. But they had both lost everything, and in that, perhaps, the rest of it might balance, and allow them to begin anew.

  Now she stood before him, as unyielding as ever. He had forgotten that— how hard she was. But you knew she wouldn’t easily forgive, he told himself. You knew you’d have to work to win her.

  He turned away. “Come.”

  He seated himself again on the alabaster bench. After a hesitation she followed, and perched gingerly opposite him.

  “This is a strange place,” she said. “So much stranger than I—” She seemed to stop herself. “Expected.”

  He looked at the chamber, for a moment seeing it fresh. The pattern of the rock into which the cavern complex wormed its way was unfamiliar to him, as so much in this world was. So he had banished it from the interlocking chambers of his quarters, altering the rooms’ proportions and overlaying them with a veneer of sandstone, banded orange and cream and gold like the sandstone of Refuge. For furnishing, he had made benches of jade and moonstone and hematite and onyx, tables of opal and chrysolite, and in his night chamber a fantastic bed of malachite, creating them by shaping blocks of gemstone, then unmaking the stone selectively into the form he desired—a technique he had developed in Refuge to amuse himself, and had never thought to put to any practical purpose. For illumination, he scooped niches into the walls and set flames inside them. The floor-fires were natural, fed with the pressed-grass bricks the pilgrims used, but the wall-flames were an artifice of his own invention, designed to eat the substance of
the air and thus to burn without any visible source of fuel. It was a feat never dreamed of, even by the skilled and powerful Shapers of Refuge. He had taught himself many things in the past year that his teachers would have called impossible.

  She was watching him. That frozen quality had relaxed; she seemed softer, more hesitant. “Did you remember what I told you in the Burning Land, about where I meant to go?” she asked. “Is that how you knew where to look for me?”

  “Yes. My men said you barely spoke to them. I thought you might have tried to tell them something about me, to get them to let you go.”

  She shook her head. “I could see they wouldn’t listen. Anyway, they wouldn’t have been surprised to hear about Refuge. You’ve put it into your stories.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you call it the Awakened City? This place?”

  “Because rata is awake. Because my followers are awake, or so they think.”

  She looked at him.

  “I was sick after Thuxra,” he said. “I almost died. When I woke I was surrounded by strangers—evildoers, all of them, blackened men. I was too weak to shape. They might have killed me, they might have torn me into pieces, and I couldn’t have done a thing to stop them. Instead, I took those blackened men and made them mine. I changed the legend of the Next Messenger to suit myself. I made a plan and put it into motion. I have more than a thousand followers now, Axane. My missionaries are everywhere. Almost every day, new pilgrims arrive.” The harsh pride of it rose in him. “I built this. I built it all out of nothing.”

  “It’s a lie.”

  He felt as if she had slapped him. Once more he had to breathe away his anger.

  “They told me about you, the men who took me. What you teach. What you plan. It’s—” She paused. “Different from what you told me in the Burning Land. You said you meant to destroy the world. To destroy the Brethren.”

  “I was wrong to think I could destroy the world,” he admitted. “But I do mean to destroy the Brethren.”

  “Your men said—”

  “I know what they said. I couldn’t tell them the truth, could I? I told them what I thought they would accept. I said I’d command the Brethren to bow down to me, and yield to me the leadership of the ratist faith. And I do mean to make them do that. But I won’t send them peacefully into retirement. Once they’ve acknowledged me, once their souls are black with blasphemy past any point of cleansing, I’ll open the earth and close them all inside, and bring their ash-cursed city down upon them.” A rush of indescribable elation gripped him. It was the first time he had ever uttered his intent aloud. Not until that moment had there been anyone he could speak it to. “And because none of them will survive, there will be no one to recognize their reborn souls, and they’ll live out the rest of their incarnations in ignorance of what they are. If indeed they are immortal, as they claim.”

  “What will you tell your followers?”

  He shrugged. “Whatever I need to.”

  “You think they will believe you?”

  “They believe anything I say.” It was the simple truth.

  Complex emotion moved in her face. “Do you think our people would want this? Do you think your family would? Do you think my father would?”

  Anger sparked again. “It’s what I want.”

  “Don’t you fear rata’s judgment?”

  “You know well what I think of rata and his judgment. Why should you ask me such a thing, anyway? You have no faith. Do you think I’ve forgotten?”

  She looked down at her hands. Within the blue-green currents of her light, her face seemed pinched. “Râvar …” She hesitated, then continued in a rush. “Râvar, you must know you can’t succeed. The people of this world will oppose you. Or you’ll make a mistake, and your followers will turn on you. You’ve told so many lies—how long can you keep it up? How long can it go on?”

  “For as long as I need it to go on.”

  “How long do you want to go on, then? Suppose you do destroy the Brethren. Will you still pretend to be the Next Messenger?” She raised her eyes to his. “Râvar, what you said, about wanting family … I understand that, I do. I know how hard it is to live in a world where you have no kin. Every day, every night I feel the hole in the world where my father used to be, where Refuge used to be. Maybe … if you had a family … you wouldn’t need all this.”

  “Oh?” He raised his brows. “Are you saying you will be my family? You and the child?”

  “Yes.”

  “And once I have you I should stop. Abandon the Awakened City. Steal away.”

  “You could do that,” she said evenly. “If you wanted to.”

  He saw what she was trying to do, saw it as clearly as the room around him. He felt no anger this time, only weariness and disappointment.

  “Show me my child.”

  For an instant she went completely still. Then she reached up to the straps of the carrying cradle and carefully slid them off her shoulders, rising to lay the cradle flat on the bench. She unlaced its ties and lifted out the child. It was swaddled in a blanket; its light was nearly as turbulent as its mother’s, the color of apple jade. It woke at her touch and began to whimper.

  “Give it to me.” Râvar held out his hands.

  The baby started to cry in earnest. With visible effort Axane stepped toward him, close enough that the margins of her lifelight brushed him. Something happened in her face, a paroxysm of dread.

  “You won’t … hurt her, will you?”

  Her question shocked him. “Give her to me,” he said roughly.

  She dropped her eyes. Bending, she placed the yelling infant in his arms. The warm, struggling bundle was unexpectedly heavy. He held the baby to his chest, clumsy with his crippled hands. Her sobs diminished, then ceased. She gazed up at him with green eyes that were almost the same color as her lifelight.

  My child, he thought, astonished. From my body. From the ugly thing Axane and I did.

  “How old is she?”

  “Nearly seven months.” He heard the strain in Axane’s voice. “Her name is Chokyi.”

  “Chokyi.” The baby hiccuped. “What sort of name is that?”

  “It’s just a name.”

  “Was it your husband who chose it?”

  She looked at him. Her eyes were large with dread.

  “Oh yes, I know all about him. My men told me. I even know his name. Gyalo. Like the false Messenger.”

  An indescribable expression flickered across her features. And, that simply, he knew.

  For a moment all he could do was sit. Then, slowly, he rose to his feet. She fell back—one step, two.

  “Not like the false Messenger,” he said. His voice seemed to come from a great distance. “He is the false Messenger.”

  Her silence admitted everything.

  “You lived with.” He could not get his breath. “You married. The creature who destroyed. Our people.”

  “No—”

  “No? Do you deny it?”

  “No—no—but it isn’t what you think—I can explain—”

  Râvar felt the room closing on him. The baby had begun to cry again; he was surprised to realize he still held her. He stooped and laid her on the bench, losing hold of her a little so that she made a thump upon the stone. Axane gasped.

  “Râvar, don’t put her there—she’ll fall—”

  “Even you,” he said. “Even you.” Meaning: I did not think even you were capable of such betrayal. I did not think even you could be so base. But the words ran together in his head, and he could not force his tongue to form them. Blood roared behind his eyes. Behind him, the baby howled.

  “Please.” Axane was weeping now. “Let me have her.”

  He covered the space between them in a single stride. She flinched, a convulsion of her entire body, her hands coming up before her f
ace.

  “Don’t hurt me. I’m her mother, she needs me—”

  Her fear disgusted him. He gripped her arm with his good hand and began to walk, pulling her after him.

  “Râvar, please. Let me have her. Please, please. Don’t separate us.” She was weeping so hard she could barely speak. “I’ll do anything, anything. Don’t take me from my child!”

  She began to struggle. In the end he had to grab her around the waist; his hands were crippled, but his arms were still strong. She twisted against his grip, screaming, kicking out with her heavy boots, beating at him with her fists. Reaching his bedchamber, he hurled her into it; she went sprawling, but was up almost at once, flinging herself toward him even as he shaped stone across the entrance. He could almost feel the impact as she struck it.

  He stood a moment, his ears ringing from the thunder of shaping in the enclosed space, half his vision stolen by its light. Then, turning, he set his body against the new-formed rock and slid slowly to the floor. He drew up his knees and set his elbows on them, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. He was sick with disillusion and disgust. Her soul was alien to him. How could he have deceived himself so? How could he have forgotten? How could he have permitted himself to slip back into the old madness, the old fallacy—that if he tried hard enough, if he strove long enough, he could win her love? That he could change her? That she was worth changing? His own stupidity stunned him.

  He could still hear her, distantly, screaming from behind the rock. At last it dawned on him that it was not Axane at all, but the baby, abandoned in the empty chamber.

  He pushed himself wearily to his feet and trudged back the way he had come. The baby lay on the bench, shrieking like a little bellows. He went to her, thinking only to stop the noise. Slipping his nearly useless left hand beneath her body and gripping her with his right, he managed to heave her up and settle her against his shoulder. In Refuge, his brothers and sisters had had infants, and he knew what to do; he held her, pacing back and forth, jogging her gently. She was hot and damp, and smelled of sour milk and dirty linen. But there was a surprising pleasure in the feel of her, this tiny creature in his arms.