The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  The Son pressed his lips to Râvar’s palms. His slanted eyes were closed. Tears crept from between his lids.

  “Abide in light, child of the First Messenger,” Râvar said softly, “first of the Brethren to acknowledge me. You will not be the last.”

  He touched the Son between the eyes, leaving behind a point of ember-orange light.

  “Beloved One,” the Son breathed. “I can hardly bear my joy.”

  “You must do more than bear it, Vivaniya of the Brethren. You must share it. This is the task I give you: Return to your Brothers and Sisters. Prepare them for my arrival. You came to me as their emissary. You will go back as mine.”

  “Yes.” The Son nodded eagerly, tears shining on his cheeks, the little blessing mark glinting on his forehead. “I will go at once. I will teach the truth. I will speak your word night and day! I will bring you not just my spirit-siblings, but all Baushpar!”

  “Bring only your spirit-siblings, and I will be satisfied. But tell me—what of your Sister Sundit? I think her heart is not as open as yours.”

  “My Sister does not give herself lightly to any understanding. That’s how she is made. But I will speak to her. I will persuade her.”

  Râvar thought of the Daughter’s steady brown gaze, her forceful questions, and was not so certain. “Let it be the first service you perform for me. Tomorrow, at the evening ceremony, I’ll present you to the faithful, so they may rejoice as I do.”

  “I will stand before them in joy.”

  “Go now, with my blessing.”

  The Son rose. “Beloved One,” he said. He hesitated, then bowed low, holding the pose a moment. Râvar understood the significance of the gesture. To whom, in the world they ruled, had the Brethren ever bowed?

  The Son departed. Râvar summoned the Twentyman and instructed him to fetch Ardashir, then returned to his chair to wait. Everything around him—the patterns of the sandstone walls, the flames in their wall-niches, the substance of the air—seemed preternaturally vivid and distinct. His body pulsed with excitement; his mind raced with plans. This was the sign, the sign he had promised to his faithful. It had come to him as naturally as if it really were a sign. At last, at last, the Awakened City would march.

  We will march.

  And all at once the amazement of it swept him and he began to laugh, a helpless laughter that shook his body and curled his ruined hands into fists. It burned his throat, scoured his chest.

  rata, are you watching? Do you see? DO YOU SEE?

  He had control of himself by the time Ardashir arrived. If the First Disciple had been roused from sleep, there was no sign; he was as faultlessly dressed and groomed as always—except for his bandages, stiff with the day’s seepage from his wounds.

  “Beloved One.” He bowed.

  “I have news, Ardashir. Such news! The Son Vivaniya has acknowledged me.”

  A beat of silence. Ardashir said: “That is news indeed, Beloved One.”

  “This is the sign, Ardashir, the sign my father promised! I will announce it tomorrow at the evening ceremony. Afterward, the Son will leave to carry word of me back to Baushpar, and you and I will ready the Awakened City for departure. Ardashir, be glad! Our great work is about to begin!”

  Ardashir regarded him with silver-dark eyes that held no trace of gladness. “This is … sudden, Beloved One.”

  “What do you mean, Ardashir? Wasn’t it you, two weeks ago, who begged me to soothe the faithful’s impatience? Well, now they need be impatient no longer. We will march!”

  “Beloved One, I beg you, do not trust this Son’s conversion. We do not truly know why these two came to us. It may have been exactly for this purpose—to touch your heart, to beguile you with false faith, and then betray you.”

  Râvar sighed. “Ardashir, your suspicion wearies me.”

  “Beloved One, I have controlled my personal feelings less well than I would have liked these past days, to my shame. But it’s not my hatred of the Brethren that speaks now. It is your nature to see what is best and purest in the world, but it is my task, blackened man that I am, to see what’s worst. It is written, What stands in sun is dark behind, and he who forgets this may be surprised by his own shadow. Allow me at least to send some of the First Faithful with the Son when he departs. They will be able to add their voices to his when he reaches Baushpar and testify to your truth and to your doctrine. In the meantime, they will help make sure his heart remains turned toward you.”

  Even in his anger, Râvar could see that this was a reasonable suggestion. “His heart is mine and will always be. But very well.”

  “Beloved One, if I may ask, what of the Daughter Sundit?”

  “She doesn’t yet share her Brother’s faith. He has said he will persuade her.”

  “What if he does not, Beloved One? Will you allow her to speak against you in Baushpar?”

  Râvar did not want to think about the Daughter Sundit. “Let me worry about that. How long will it take to ready the Awakened City for departure?”

  “Two weeks, Beloved One. Perhaps a little less.”

  “Make it less. Begin immediately.”

  “Yes, Beloved One.” Ardashir hesitated. “And the woman and her child? Are they to travel with us?”

  He could not have asked a more unwelcome question. “Why should that be your concern?”

  “I only wish to know what arrangements I should make, Beloved One. How I should introduce them to your faithful—”

  “It is not your task to introduce them to the faithful! By the Blood, you try me with these objections. You should be on your knees, giving thanks for the news I’ve just given you!”

  “Beloved One—”

  “No. I’m done with you. Go.”

  Ardashir bowed, stone-faced, and left the chamber. Râvar paced his rooms, trying to subdue his anger, but the very fact that he was angry only made him angrier—all his triumph, ruined by Ardashir with his questions and suspicions. He halted at last beside the bathing pool, before the wall behind which his captives were confined for the night. Against his will, he knew that Ardashir was right—he would have to make up his mind, once and for all, about Axane.

  For some reason a memory came to him, of himself and her, in the moments before he went forth to destroy Thuxra City. He had asked her to bear witness to that act, to the beginning of his deception: the one person in the world who knew the truth of who he was and why he had come. She had refused. Yet afterward, just before he fell into unconsciousness, he had glimpsed her—a small dark figure within her tumult of ocean colors, watching after all.

  He put forth his power. The wall before him vanished in a shout of sound and light. Parvâti, roused, began to cry. Axane was sitting up in bed. She turned on him a face wet with tears.

  “Why are you weeping?”

  “I was …” She caught her breath. “Dreaming.” She dragged her hands across her face, then turned to lift the howling child. “Hush.” She held Parvâti to her shoulder, stroking the baby’s stiff little back. “Hush, little bird.”

  “The Son Vivaniya acknowledged me tonight,” Râvar said, above Parvâti’s dwindling cries.

  Axane’s brimming eyes rose to his.

  “It’s true. He got down on his knees and named me the Next Messenger. You didn’t think I could do it, did you. You thought I’d fail.”

  “No,” she whispered. Parvâti was hiccuping.

  “He’s going back to the others as my emissary. He’ll give them word of me, just as he gave them the lie about the Cavern, and teach them to believe it. When I get to Baushpar, they’ll all be waiting.”

  She nodded, docile as a doll. Tears still welled from her eyes. What had he expected? That she would rejoice? The bitter anger rose again—cheated a second time of his triumph, all his jubilation turned to ash.

  “You’ll see it,” he said, viciously. “I
’ll bring you with me. I’ll make you watch it all, every moment, all the way to Baushpar. I won’t let you close your eyes. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  The despair in her face gave him an ugly jolt of pleasure. His eyes moved on her slender throat, her bare brown arms. The thin fabric of her chemise was pulled tight across her breasts. In imagination he bridged the gap between them; he felt her under his ruined hands. Desire shook him as his anger had—or perhaps they were the same—and something else, the nameless thing that, all his life, had impelled him to try and turn the world around him to his will, whether or not the world was willing.

  For just an instant, he felt the naked truth of his aloneness.

  He turned away. He closed her in, slamming the stone into place as if he were striking her. He strode toward the passage that opened on the underworld, to spend himself amid the depths, where only he would ever see the light he made, or hear the cataclysms of his unleashed power.

  12

  Sundit

  I CAN HARDLY believe what I must write. I can hardly bear to record it.

  Vivaniya went out last night after we had all retired, taking Mur and Karamsuu with him. I wondered at it but was not alarmed, assuming that in the morning he would explain. I did not hear him return; when I woke, he was still asleep. He did not rise for the Communion ceremony, or for breakfast. Not until the morning was well advanced did he call Yailin to attend him. He emerged soon after from his tent, stumbling in his clumsy way, and crossed to where Drolma and I were sorting her notes from yesterday.

  “Sister, I need to speak with you.” He looked flushed and feverish, as if he were beginning to grow sick.

  “Brother, are you unwell?” I reached to set my hand on his forehead, but he leaned away.

  “Please, Sundit.”

  I led him to my tent. He looped the flaps down behind us, hiding us from the others’ sight, then knelt before me on the matting, not bothering with a cushion.

  “I went to see him,” he said without preamble. “Last night.”

  I did not have to ask whom he meant. It surprised me (though perhaps it should not have)—but again, did not alarm me. So there was nothing more than irritation in my response. “Vanyi, we’re here to make a mutual determination. You should have waited.”

  “I had a question. I needed an answer.”

  “Right at that moment? You could not let it keep till morning?”

  “Sunni.” His gaze captured mine, and I realized that the fire in him was not fever. I felt the breath of disaster even as he spoke. “He is the Next Messenger.”

  It was a moment before I could find my voice. “Vanyi. There is not yet sufficient evidence to conclude such a thing.”

  “He knows.” He leaned toward me. I could feel the heat coming off him. “He knows everything. Not just that I’d traveled in the Burning Land. About Refuge. About what happened there. About … me and Dâdar, our lie. He told me my own story as I stood listening, as if he’d witnessed it. How could he have such knowledge unless rata gave it to him?”

  “Did he tell you that?” I’d opened my eyes that morning in the same state of uncertainty in which I had closed them the night before—halfway between believing and not believing, between the Blood the claimant bears, his beauty and his power and his perception, and his strange divergent doctrines, which have no precedent in the Darxasa or any of the teachings of our father. While the real Messenger might indeed possess god-given understanding of Vanyi’s deed, it seemed to me that a false Messenger might have come by the information also, in a less miraculous way. On the day of our arrival, Vanyi demonstrated his awe and dread as clearly as if he had shouted them aloud. A clever pretender—who, to build a deception as elaborate as this Awakened City must certainly be capable of extraordinary feats of spiritual and emotional manipulation—might well have exploited that, drawing Vivaniya to confess the secrets that burden him so terribly, then feigning prior knowledge. “Did he say his knowledge comes from the god?”

  “What other possibility is there? Sunni, I’ve been fighting the truth since we arrived, since I first saw him on his throne. Last night I could no longer fight. I could no longer deny the truth that is in my heart. I surrendered, and all my burden slipped away.” He smiled, an expression of terrible joy. “I knelt to him. I declared my faith. I looked into his face, and saw forgiveness there. Oh, Sunni, what that means …”

  “Brother.” I tried to remain calm. “This certainly demands investigation. But it’s too soon to make a final determination. There are too many unanswered questions. There is still too much we do not know. We have discussed this—”

  “No, you have discussed. I have only listened. You say that he is too arrogant, that he is too beautiful, that he glories too much in the display of his power—but should the Next Messenger be humble, and ugly, and hide his divinity? Where is it written he must be like that, or indeed, like anything at all? Will not rata make his Messenger as he chooses?”

  “Of course. That is why we must take care.”

  “Must everything be so closely proven, Sunni? What of faith?”

  “It is for the sake of faith that I hesitate.”

  “He wears the true Blood around his neck. You held it in your hands. You cut your finger on its facets. How can that not move you? You say you stand between belief and disbelief—let me guide you from that barren place, let me help you to the truth. Let me take you to him. He’ll speak to you as he did to me. He will know your secrets, too.”

  I felt an entirely irrational chill. “I have no desire to hear my secrets spoken, even supposing he could do such a thing.”

  “You disguise it as deliberation, Sunni, but I see the truth. You are afraid—afraid as I was afraid when I denied the Cavern of the Blood, afraid as we all are afraid, all us Brethren. Do you remember, in the beginning, how we longed for the fulfillment of rata’s Promise? How we said to each other May it be soon, as the Shapers do in their Communion services? How we said Let sleep come? How long has it been since any of us truly wished for sleep? We have lived too long, and now we can’t let go of life, even though that is what our Covenant requires. It is as the people say. We have grown weak. We are unfit to lead the church. The Messenger is right to demand we step aside and yield rule of rata’s Way to him.”

  A horror had fallen on me as he spoke. To hear such things from him—my straightforward unreflective Vanyi, who in his lives has rarely spoken against the majority, or questioned the ways of tradition … I looked into the handsome face he wears in this incarnation, a face that I have known in youth and adolescence, in sickness and in vigor, in joy and anger and despair, and knew with falling certainty that he was lost to me, that no word of mine could turn him from this disastrous course. Still I tried.

  “Vanyi, I beg you, withhold conclusion for a little while. That’s all I ask—just that you hold back. Let us finish our investigation here and return with our findings to our spirit-siblings. Let us all decide together.”

  “It’s too late. I’ve already promised.”

  Cold fear stabbed me. “Promised? Promised what?”

  “To be his emissary. To carry his word to Baushpar and to our spirit-siblings.”

  “Vanyi, no! You cannot promise such a thing! You must go to him, you must go to him at once and tell him you cannot do it!”

  He surged to his feet, knocking his head against a strut of the collapsible tent frame and setting the whole structure shuddering. “Sunni, I love you. But your heart is closed. I can’t listen to you any longer.”

  “Vanyi, wait!”

  But he was already gone, blundering through the tent flaps. I heard him call to Mur and Karamsuu. I did not try to pursue him—I did not want to set our disagreement on public display, and sensed anyway that it would do no good. My dismay was already passing into anger. I cursed Vivaniya for his guilt, cursed myself for my in
attention. I knew the conflict in him. I saw how his dread and eagerness grew as we approached this place, though he made efforts to conceal it. I should have watched him more closely once we arrived. I should have made more effort to pierce his silence. But I’ve been preoccupied with the things we have seen, with the questions they have raised. And in honesty, with my own discomfort in those questions.

  I left my tent and summoned Reanu and Apui. We swept out into the main cavern, with its dark, toothed ceiling and its glimmering cook fires, its stench of smoke and unclean people and stale cooking and ordure. Heads turned as we passed, but no hard-faced functionary came hurrying to halt us, and we reached the passageway at the cavern’s back wall unmolested. By the low, unnaturally regular stairway that leads to the claimant’s quarters, one of the so-called Twentymen who serve as aides to that odious creature, Ardashir, stood guard.

  “Tell him I am here to see him.” I could not bring myself to speak the tide. “Now!”

  All my fury flew from me in that word. The man flinched and hurried to obey. As in the rest of Arsace, some here despise us, but many still hold us in reverence.

  I heard a thrumming sound—a drum? Then silence. The guard reappeared. “The Next Messenger will see you, Old One.”

  He bowed and stepped aside. I mounted the steps, Reanu and Apui behind me. A short corridor lay slantwise beyond the entrance, ending on a sizable space filled with rosy light. It was not another cavern: It was, or seemed to be, a real room, with four flat walls and a smooth regular ceiling and a level floor, formed not of the gray limestone that makes up the rest of this place but of some rock striated in glowing shades of red and russet and orange and cream. Little niches marched around the walls, each with a small flame inside it. At the room’s center, raised on a shallow dais, stood a massive chair hewn from quartz.

  I had no time to wonder at these things, strange as they were, for beside the chair the claimant stood waiting, and like a torch in a darkened room he immediately captured all my attention. I’ve described him as I saw him first, robed and throned, and as I saw him later, wrapped miraculously in light. Now he appeared in a third guise, clad in a rough dun-colored tunic, his feet bare and his long black hair pulled untidily over one shoulder. In his disarray he was no less charismatic, no less beautiful. The Blood of rata (which, as Vanyi said, I know beyond any doubt is the true Blood) burned like a coal upon his chest.