She quieted at last, hiccuping into his neck. He sat on one of the benches, letting her slip down so that she lay in the crook of his arm. He pulled his sleeve over his right hand and wiped her cheeks and nose. She had a cap of wispy black hair, stuck to her scalp now with sweat, and had inherited his finegrained amber skin. She stared up at him with her green eyes, her gaze grave and fearless. There was no knowledge in it, no judgment, no desire, no need. She did not see him as a savior. She did not see him as a rapist. She simply saw him.
My child, he thought, this time with wonder.
She squirmed, her limbs pushing against the constriction of her blanket. He drew back its folds, freeing her little arms. She gave a small crowing cry, and reached up to grab a strand of his hair. Gently he detached it, giving her a crooked finger to hold instead. She clutched it with surprising strength and chuckled, her plump cheeks creasing. He felt a softening within himself, as if a sharp edge had fallen away. Warmth unfolded in the region of his heart. At first he did not recognize it.
Love.
Sometime later she began to howl, and nothing he could do would soothe her. He returned to his bedchamber and unblocked it. Axane was crouched against the bed; she sprang to her feet at once. There was a spreading bruise on one cheek. She had eyes only for the child.
He stood a moment, prolonging her suffering. But the baby’s cries were becoming desperate, and at last he stepped forward and offered her to her mother. Axane gasped and clutched her shrieking daughter to her breast, burying her face in the baby’s shoulder.
“Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you, thank you.”
“I could find a woman from among my followers to nurse her.” He had to raise his voice to be heard above the baby’s yells. “It wouldn’t be difficult.”
Axane raised her head. “Please don’t. I won’t give you any trouble, I swear.”
“I was wrong to bring you here.” The admission of his failure was like lead upon his tongue. “It could never have worked. I see that now.”
In her face he saw a despair beyond fear. “What will you do with us?”
What, indeed? He turned away. “You can have this room. For now.”
He closed them in again. He made his way through his empty apartment, to the bench where he had sat a few moments ago with his daughter in his arms. He sank down on it, his hands hanging between his knees, and did not move for a long time.
7
Râvar
HE WAS ENTOMBED within the rock, and cold, so cold. To his left was light, a golden ocean of it, pulsing like a living thing. To his right lay the darkness of the passage he had blocked off. Beyond the passage an army waited, demons in the form of men. They had come to Refuge to extinguish the light—to destroy the Cavern of the Blood, where rata had slept away the eons but slept no more. But he was the Cavern’s protector, by duty and desire. He had sealed it from the demons’ sight with a shaping so perfect that even another Shaper would not be able to detect it. And he had closed himself inside, to defend it.
He had done what was needed, and done it well. What then was the dread that possessed him, the sense of something left terribly unfinished? Wasn’t there something else … something else I should have saved—
A jolt. Time paused, stuttering, then leaped forward at dizzying speed. He was no longer in the Cavern, but on the ledge beneath it. Below, the river Revelation sang its joyous song, rushing down to Refuge. The demons had gone. Safe, he thought. But the cold was still inside him, and the dread, the certainty of some horrible oversight—
Another jolt. He stood in Refuge. But where the Temple had been, and Labyrinth and the Treasury and the House of Dreams, there was only rubble. The demons had destroyed his home, defacing the carvings and smashing the equipment and pulling down the walls and ceilings of the caves where his people had lived and worked. “Why?” he shouted. “Why?” The ruin of Refuge drank his words like water, giving nothing back, not even an echo. And the voice inside his head, frantic now, screamed: Run! There may still be time—
Another jolt. He was at the mouth of the cleft. He could see the trail the demons had left beside the river. He was following it, running—
Another jolt. The cleft was far behind; he was among the bitterbark trees that grew on Revelation’s banks. He understood now that he was dreaming. He fought to pull away, for he knew where the dream would take him. He could already hear the sound, the awful whining—
Another jolt. And the bluff was there, ahead, with Revelation rolling past and the roaring of the flies and the sprawling darkness on the banks—
He screamed—aloud? It hardly mattered, for in reality, as in his dream, there was no one to hear him—and twisted like a fish on a hook. The dream broke. He bolted upright. He sat gasping, eyes open on the dimness of his chamber, afraid even to blink for fear that sleep would seize him back and force him to complete the journey.
At last, certain he was fully awake, Râvar drew up his knees and laid his forehead on them, drawing long breaths, willing his knotted muscles to relax. At least this time he had been able to interrupt it. He could not always manage that. What waited at the dream’s end was cobbled and distorted out of his real memories, yet even the hideous pictures inside his head were not as terrible as what the dreams forced him to witness. Sometimes he saw his family die, his mother thrust through with a lance, his sisters and their children pierced by arrows, his cousins cut down with swords, while he stood rooted to the spot, unable even to cry out. Sometimes he arrived after the massacre was done, and was compelled to crawl among the corpses like one of the carrion-eaters that had been at them when he found them. Worst was when they spoke to him. Become like us, they murmured. Be nothing, no one. Let no living soul remember you. Or they reproached him: What is faith beside the ties of blood? How could you choose rata over us? Or, horribly and for that very thing, they praised him. You made the bravest choice, they sighed. rata is eternal. We are whispers, blades of grass.
It did not matter what they said. He knew the truth, knew it waking and sleeping: He was guilty of their deaths—he, the last of Refuge’s ordained Shapers. There had been only him, after the failure of the resistance he and his fellow Shapers had mounted against the Brethren’s army, to defend his people. Instead, he had chosen to defend the Cavern of the Blood. Never mind that it was the charge laid on him by Refuge’s leader. Never mind that he had not imagined that rata would allow Refuge to be destroyed: He and his people were rata’s chosen, whom the god might test but would not abandon. The truth, the bare truth, was that he had been afraid—afraid of the demon soldiers with their manita that could kill a Shaper’s power, afraid to stand against them alone. And because of his fear, Refuge had died.
They had taught him this, his people—or their corpses had, when he found them. They had taught him other things as well, a learning begun and completed in the two days he spent upon the riverbank, watching them rot. Either rata was a capricious god, who cruelly turned his face away from suffering and injustice, or the founders of Refuge had been mistaken and rata had never chosen Refuge at all. His faith left him as he sat there, the faith that had sometimes filled him up so hugely he thought his skin must split to let it out. He had felt it burning out of him, as if it were water and his murdered people were the sun.
I choose you, he had sworn to them at the end of his vigil, the flame of new intent flickering in the void where faith had been—a very tiny flame, but still a light against the nothingness that had nearly consumed him. Not rata. Never rata, never again. He had buried them, opening up the riverbank and closing them beneath it, smoothing the ground so no trace of their agony remained. Then he had turned his back and taken the first step on the long, long journey that had brought him to this world.
Do you think it’s what they would have wanted? The question Axane had asked on the night of her arrival spoke inside his mind. It’s what I want, he had told her. Thinking of that
reply, he felt ashamed. It was what he wanted. But the Awakened City was not for him. It was for Refuge. All of it, all of it for Refuge.
His face was wet with tears. He rubbed them away with the heels of his hands, then wadded up his pillows and leaned back, drawing up the coverings of his bed—not the elaborate malachite affair in the room he had given to Axane and the baby, but a simple platform he had shaped against one wall of his bathing chamber. He had extinguished the sourceless flames so he could sleep, but they still burned in the room beyond, and by their warm light he could see the wall opposite, where stone plugged the entrance to his night chamber. Behind it, Axane slept. He was uncomfortably aware of her closeness, as he had been for each of the six days and nights since her arrival—an awareness that, depending on his mood and the direction of his thoughts, was angry, painful, bitter, or, with profound unwillingness, desirous. It had always been a thing apart, his desire for her, entirely separate from his intellect, from anything he knew or understood, a drive as indifferent to will and logic as the currents of the river Revelation. He was troubled by thoughts of how he had forced her in the Burning Land—of how it had felt not just to expend his lust but to humble her. It was not what he had wanted with her; it was never what he had wanted. But it was what he had done, and he could not prevent himself from remembering, or from being stirred.
In the aftermath of the dream, it was not lust he felt, nor anger or disgust or any of those raw emotions, but something more like longing. To wake from nightmares to the warmth of another’s body, the comfort of another’s arms. To speak his dreams aloud, to drag those dark things out of the cage of his mind and expose them to the light—where, perhaps, they might begin to wither, to loosen their grip.
No, he thought, bracing himself against his weakness. Don’t think of it. He turned on his side so he would not see the wall, and waited open-eyed for morning.
Above the bathing pool, he had shaped a wide channel through the rock, all the way to the top of the ridge within which the caverns ran. He had grown up in caves, but never beyond easy sight of the world outside, and in this deep place it had oppressed him not to be able to gauge the passage of time. Rain fell through the opening, and sometimes things less pleasant—but it was worth it, to follow the exchange of day and night.
The light that stole down the channel was still spectral when the announcement drum sounded. He rose and went out to the reception room, where the guard on duty had left his morning meal: two dishes of the wheat-and-rice porridge that was the community’s staple, two cups of metallic-tasting water. It was what his followers ate; apart from his private living space and the gifts they gave him, he made it a point to have nothing the faithful could not share. This was less noble than it seemed, given that he could shape food for himself. He did so now: honey to sweeten the bland grain, a handful of the tart red berries that the people of Refuge had called bloodglobes, which did not grow in the world beyond the Burning Land. It was one of the things that bolstered his followers’ belief in the miraculousness of his powers, that he was able to shape things completely foreign to them.
With his right hand, which still worked more or less as a hand should, he lifted one of the cups, and, holding it to his chest with his crippled left hand, took up one of the bowls. He returned to his night chamber and put forth his will. A flash, a cracking percussion; and the plug that blocked the entrance was gone.
Axane was nursing the baby. She turned away, but not quickly enough to spare him the sight of her bare shoulder and naked breast. It went through him like a knife; for a moment he could not move.
“She’ll be finished soon.” Her voice was dull. The child’s jade green light trembled within the storm of her mother’s darker colors.
“I’ll come back later.” It had become his habit to take the baby in the mornings; that day, though, he had other obligations. He set the food on the floor and closed them in again.
He ate his own breakfast, then shaped water in a basin and shaved his face with a razor that had been a gift from one of his followers. He dressed in garments bartered from the nomads: a quilted undertunic, a bright-dyed overtunic, quilted leggings, leather boots shod with silver. He was to go among his followers, but he would not wear his cloak of light; on ritual occasions he went to them as a god, but at other times he appeared in a more ordinary guise, to remind them that part of him was human. He combed the tangles from his hair, leaving it loose down his back since he no longer possessed the dexterity to braid or bind it. Once he had taken pleasure in his good looks and devoted much attention to dressing and grooming himself. It had been a long time since that was so. But the faithful expected him to be beautiful for them, and though they belonged to him soul and body, there was a sense in which they owned him, too, or at least the semblance of him that was the object of their faith.
He retrieved the necklace from beneath the overturned bowl where he kept it at night, so the restless fire of the Blood would not disturb his sleep. He had shaped the gold of which it was made; one of the First Faithful, a jeweler before his imprisonment, had crafted it, with a heavy chain and a thick casing to hold the crystal, as big as a man’s clenched fist. At night when he removed it, he could trace the grooves the links had printed in the skin of his neck. He lowered it over his head—carefully, for the casing left the Blood’s razor facets uncovered at the front. He could read the lattice structure of the crystal, common to any gem; but the fire at its heart resisted understanding, for though it was not alive, it resembled the light of life, which Shaper senses could perceive but not comprehend.
The announcement drum sounded again, and he left his chambers. The passage beyond ran between the huge cavern at the front, where the citizens of the Awakened City lived, and the smaller, deeper cave where daily ceremonies were conducted. Originally it had been little more than a rough fissure, but for the comfort of his followers Râvar had widened and smoothed it, and shaped a stairway into the sharp drop that led down to the ceremonial cave. Ardashir was waiting with two members of the Band of Twenty, the specially chosen group of men who served the First Disciple as aides and assistants and, sometimes, enforcers. The Twentymen wore plaited grass armbands to mark their status; they carried staves of pale bitterbark wood, shaped by Râvar, and held smoky torches made of twisted grass soaked in animal fat.
“Beloved One.” All three bowed low. The Twentymen turned and led the way along the passage’s uphill slope. Râvar and Ardashir fell in behind.
A squared opening at the passage’s end gave onto the twilit reaches of the main cavern. Its floor was crowded with the encampments of the faithful, marked out and made crudely private with dividers improvised from draped fabric or woven grass or stacked stones. In each, a carefully tended cook fire burned. Despite their cobbled and primitive air, the little living areas were neat—Ardashir, who supervised every aspect of life and work in the Awakened City, decreed it should be so. Natural fissures dispelled most of the smoke, but the atmosphere was acrid, pungent with the smell of crowded humanity. Far away, the perfect arch of the entrance framed blank blue sky. The ridge that held the cavern complex rose at the margin of the foothills of the Range of Clouds; below lay only a descending slope and the flatness of the steppe.
A broad aisle between the encampments served as a kind of thoroughfare. At this hour of the day most of Râvar’s followers were elsewhere, performing their allotted labor, but there were always a few who remained—the sick, the injured, those who had just arrived and had not yet been assigned a work group. Men and women propped themselves up in their blankets to watch Râvar pass, or hitched to their knees in attitudes of prayer, or scurried forward to get a closer look.
“Messenger!” Their whispers followed him. Their lifelights glinted in the dimness. “Beautiful One! Beloved of rata!”
Râvar spread his hands in benediction, but, according to the custom of these excursions, did not pause.
Near the entrance, another passag
e opened in the left-hand wall. This passage was entirely artificial, punched by Râvar through the solid stone to give access to the otherwise inaccessible cave adjacent to the main cavern. Walls, floor, and ceiling displayed the precise proportions, the water-smooth planes and rounded angles that were the hallmark of Shaper stonework. By the standards of Refuge, it was an unremarkable making; but in this world that feared and hated shaping and knew nothing of its uses, it was a great wonder.
The Twentymen quickened their pace as they neared the passage’s end. “The Next Messenger comes!” they called. “Prepare for the Next Messenger!” By the time Râvar emerged into the cave, all the workers were on their knees.
“Messenger,” they murmured. “Beloved One.”
“Rise, children. Return to your work.”
They obeyed. This cave, lower-ceilinged than the main cavern but nearly as large, held the community’s food stores—the grain and salt and fruit Râvar replenished weekly, the meat and other edibles brought back by the hunting and foraging parties—and also much of the work that maintained the Awakened City. Here as elsewhere, Ardashir’s genius for organization was apparent. The workers were grouped by activity—the pounding and spinning of steppe grass into coarse thread, the weaving of fabric on crude standing looms, the sewing of blankets and simple garments (for many of the faithful arrived in rags), the pressing of the grass bricks that fueled the pilgrims’ cook fires, the knapping of flint blades and arrowheads for hunting, the preparation of bows and arrow shafts and knife hafts. Though there was no opening to the outside, the atmosphere was fresh; all the caverns were riddled with fissures, invisible to the naked eye but apparent to Râvar’s patternsense, and he had enhanced them here so that the great space breathed, drawing in new air, expelling old.
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