The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  “Old One.” Reanu came to crouch outside the square of shade cast by the blanket. “The apostate says there is a stream.”

  “A stream? Where?”

  “To the east. We can see nothing, but he claims there are patterns”—his mouth curled with disgust—“in the air that tell him of water. Shall I investigate?”

  I looked past him, to where the apostate sat a little apart from the rest, his knees drawn up and his arms draped loosely over them. “Yes. If you find it, we’ll make our camp there.”

  He chose two of his men and sent them off. I bent over Drolma, using the end of my filthy stole to blot the sweat from her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry to be so weak, Old One,” she whispered.

  “Hush,” I told her. “Rest.”

  The men returned to report that there was indeed a stream. We began to walk again. At last we crested a rise and saw the stream below, its course fringed with brush and low bushes. The heat of summer had reduced it to a shallow flow across the tumbled rocks at the center of its bed, but the current was brisk and the water sweet. What a luxury it was to bathe! Drolma and Ha-tsun and I took turns holding up a screen of blankets, and the Tapati went downstream in groups. Reanu escorted the apostate separately. Reanu must know—of course he knows—that this guard-and-prisoner behavior is mostly a charade; the apostate is no more immune to a punch knife than anyone else, but apart from that there’s little Reanu can do to prevent him from behaving exactly as he pleases. Still Reanu maintains the appearance of control, setting watches at night, ensuring that the apostate is flanked during the day by at least two men. What’s interesting is that the apostate consents to this, behaving exactly as a prisoner would.

  He created food for us and we ate, sitting by the water in the twilight. Drolma as usual drew on her own supplies. Then she and Ha-tsun retired to their bedrolls, as did the Tapati. And I …

  I went to the apostate.

  I truly intended, at the close of my last entry, never to go near him again, never to allow him another chance to pour ugly words into my ear. But over the past two days I’ve grown to realize (or perhaps only to admit I realize) that I cannot be done with him so easily, much as I might wish it. He is a question, this man. He demands an answer. I cannot explain it more clearly than that.

  Reanu was on guard before my tent, as usual. I told him what I meant to do. He said nothing, but I felt his eyes on me as I walked to where the apostate had spread his blanket. He sat cross-legged—whispering, perhaps, to his Dreamer wife. Like the rest of us, he had washed his clothes and put them on again wet; his long hair, which he normally keeps tightly braided, hung loose down his back. He seemed neither surprised nor dismayed to see me. Our confrontation might never have occurred. I was already angry at myself for the need, or curiosity, or whatever it was, that had drawn me to him; I felt myself grow angrier. I had meant to thank him for finding water, but the words stuck in my throat.

  “How is your aide?” he asked. “I was afraid she would allow herself to die of thirst.”

  “I’m surprised you would feel any sympathy for her.”

  “Why? Because as an apostate, I must wish to tempt all Shapers from their vows?” He shook his head. “I haven’t forgotten that I was once as she is. In her situation, I would have felt the same.”

  “Well,” I said. “She is better now.” Still, I could not bring myself to thank him. “Reanu told me you saw signs in the air that spoke of water.”

  “Yes.”

  “That is part of an apostate’s skill?”

  “It’s part of a free gift of shaping. There are signs … patterns … in everything that exists. But you know this. Surely you remember, from before the Shaper War.”

  “Ah, but you don’t believe in my immortality. Isn’t that what you told me the other night?”

  “I’ve speculated about many things,” he said quietly. “It’s not the same as certainty.”

  The night was clear and full of moonlight, the sound of water just audible below the hiss of the wind. On the body of the steppe the dominant grasses are tall and tough, with nodding heads like wheat or rye, but a different strain grows by the stream, short and threadlike. I stared at it, wondering in the front of my mind how a place of such apparent monotony can in fact be so infinitely varied, while with a deeper part of myself I considered the apostate. The deadly power he had used to help us. His feigning of the ways of prisonerhood—so that our fear of him might be eased? So that Reanu, before his men, might not lose face? For his own amusement? How, in the caverns, he stood and let me recognize him. I thought of the impossible fact of his survival, of the even more impossible chance that the two of us should ever meet. I thought of the accusations he had flung at me the other night—of the horrible cold shock I felt, not of anger, but of recognition. A voice seemed to speak inside my head: Here he is. Here I am. For just an instant I felt—seemed to feel—the presence of something huge, leaning up out of the night.

  I sank to my knees across from him, hugging my damp stole around me against the chilly air. “Centuries ago,” I said, “before the Shaper War, we Brethren had Shapers to guard us. Did you know that?”

  I saw his surprise. “No.”

  “Those are old, old memories. It has been long since I was face-to-face with an untethered Shaper, longer still since I spoke with one. Tell me of these patterns you perceive.”

  His brow creased into a frown. “Why?”

  “Because I am here.” I spoke my thought. “Because you are.”

  “I’m not a book, Sundit of the Brethren. You won’t be able to close me if I say things you don’t want to hear.”

  “But I can rise and walk away.”

  He watched me, troubled. I began to think he might refuse. “What do you want to know?”

  Thus began one of the strangest conversations I believe I have ever had— not simply for the sake of what I am and what he is, but because I had not, till then, realized how much I had allowed myself to forget—beyond the basics, I mean, the narrow knowledge necessary to administer the Doctrine of Baushpar: the signs of shaping’s manifestation in girls and boys at the time of puberty, the art of manita preparation and dosage, the training by which young Shapers are habituated to their tethers and prepared for priestly service. With utter frankness he spoke of the patterns he sees in all things, as integral to his perception as form and color to a non-Shaper—the patterns of unliving things, which he can grasp and manipulate, and the patterns of living things, whose light he can perceive but whose structure he can neither understand nor re-create. “What color is my light?” I asked, and he told me it is lapis blue with darker currents, and that his is the color of a pearl, and that Drolma’s is pale rose, and that Reanu’s is the exact hue of ripe wheat. He described how the steppe appears to him: the wind roiling the substance of the air like currents in clear water, the grasses breathing the pale light of their life, the birds and insects and small ground-dwelling creatures glinting like sparks or stars. Of the stars themselves, which whisper a design too vast even for a Shaper to comprehend.

  “The ability I knew while I served the church,” he said, “was like peering through a half-open door. The freedom I have now is like knocking down not just the door, but the wall into which it was set.”

  He claims he is still pursuing the limits of his gift. There are restrictions: He can infinitely re-create the natural, insensate world, but he cannot make what is artificial or what is living. The clay he can shape, but not the brick; he can shape oranges or almonds or roses, which are dead in the instant of their plucking, but not the growing tree or the rooted plant. He described, a little, the process by which he has passed beyond the narrow boundaries of ratist training: his experiments in the Burning Land during his first apostasy, his more recent preparation for his arrival in the Awakened City. Apart from this, he claims, he has not used his gift at all since his escape from Faal—nev
er, not once. I found that very difficult to believe, and said so. He shrugged.

  “It’s true, whether you believe it or not. For one thing, it wasn’t safe. Shaping can’t be practiced discreetly—that’s obvious even from small uses of it. Even inside my own house, I would have risked discovery.” He paused. “I also feared how it might change me, if I used it freely.”

  “Madness and corruption, you mean, like the tales of the apostates of old?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I haven’t believed that for a long time, that a free ability inevitably drives a Shaper to such things. I feel no madness in myself, and never have. I saw no madness in the Shapers of Refuge, who were free all their lives. Hubris, perhaps—but hubris is not madness. Yet shaping is the very power rata used at creation—born into us in miniature, it’s true, but far greater than any human ability. If you are capable of anything, what’s to stop you from doing anything, apart from your own will, your own sense of right and wrong? Which in each man or woman is a different thing, and in some is barely a sense at all. Such power tempts the failings of our ash-natures, the pride and greed and cruelty we all possess. The danger of shaping is not that Shapers must misuse their gifts. It is that they might.”

  “Does it really make a difference? Whether it’s shaping that corrupts the soul or the soul that corrupts shaping, the result is the same.”

  “No. For if you can yield, you can also resist.”

  “Did you fear yourself incapable of resisting, then?”

  He did not reply at once. He had taken up the hem of his shirt and was smoothing it between his fingers. “It seems to me that there must be a middle way, a way between total freedom and absolute restriction. Unfettered shaping is perilous. But the Doctrine of Baushpar belittles the god’s gift, makes a ghost of it. I think the Shapers of Refuge came close to a middle way, their shaping free and yet bound by oaths of service—”

  “But there is Râvar. Who alone justifies every restriction of the Doctrine.”

  “But who’s to say, if I’d never discovered Refuge, that Râvar would have lived anything but a blameless life? Of course, the danger is always there. I am not like Râvar … I am not … proud. Or cruel. But I have failings, many of them. What if the temptation were so subtle that I could not see it? What if I were to change, and not know? So I imagined the possibility of a middle way, but I didn’t try to pursue it. You’re right. I was afraid. I am afraid.”

  That raw honesty again. In spite of myself, it moved me. “It can’t be easy to have such a thing within you and never set it free.”

  “But it is free. I see as a Shaper. I think as a Shaper. I experience the world as a Shaper. That’s always been what I loved most about the gift, even when I was bound—the beauty it shows me. The beauty the god himself must have seen, when he made the world. The beauty that lives in all things, untouched by the Enemy’s ash.”

  “Will that be enough, when all of this is over?”

  “Do you mean, having finally begun to use my power, will I stop? No,” he said. “I don’t think I will.”

  Something in his voice suggested that he had only just that moment understood it. His words might have been a challenge, but they were not, nor did I hear them so. It seems strange now to remember. Yet as we spoke we had somehow passed beyond the ordinary world, in which he is a base and wretched sinner, and I am the implacable prosecutor of that sin.

  He dropped his shirt hem and clasped his hands—which, I have only lately noticed, are scarred across the palms and fingers like Râvar’s, though he is not perceptibly crippled. “You’ve never said why you and your Brother were in the Awakened City.”

  “We came to investigate Râvar’s claim.”

  “There have been other claims like his. How many of them have the Brethren investigated—themselves, I mean, in person?”

  “Not like his. It was a heresy more organized and consistent than any we have encountered in some time, with a leader who appeared to be an apostate Shaper.” Of course I did not tell him the whole truth. I was not—am not—ready to confront the ramifications of that. “Even so, we did not expect what we found.”

  “How is it that your Brother fell to belief?”

  “Vivaniya in this incarnation is … vulnerable to persuasion. As you know, Râvar is persuasive. I tried to intervene. I was not successful.”

  “And so your Brother left you there.”

  “Yes.” I sighed. “Perhaps I should have feigned belief. But I could not force myself to such pretense, even in self-protection. Besides, I didn’t yet know Râvar’s true intent. I thought I was only to be a hostage—it never occurred to me he would dare to harm me. Although apparently he did not dare do so openly. He came alone to fetch us to the cave where you found us, after his City had departed. Even that creature Ardashir, who would have looked on my body-death and smiled, doesn’t know what he did.”

  “Will any of your spirit-siblings heed your Brother?”

  “One or two may. Most will not. Râvar is a clever boy, but not as clever as he imagines. He supposes we are all the same. He supposes the word of any of us will sway the rest. It isn’t so. The harm he has done is all to my Brother.”

  I became aware that I was winding the tassels of my stole around my fingers; I let them fall.

  “How did Utamnos die?” the apostate asked.

  I told him some of it—how, soon after he was dispatched to Faal, my dear Brother took to his bed, how I sat by him as his spirit’s hold upon its flesh-shell weakened. I did not speak of the fear he conceived before he left his body: that we had been mistaken in turning from news of rata’s rising. I used to wish he had clung to his shell long enough to know of Dâdar’s and Vivaniya’s return. Now I am glad, for it would have been false relief.

  “I’d just come to Ninyâser when it happened,” the apostate said. “I made an offering for him in the temple of Inriku.” I nodded, remembering my Brother’s devotion to that Aspect. “It always seemed appropriate that I should follow my new trade there.”

  “I’m fostering him,” I said. “His new incarnation.”

  “I’m glad it’s you.”

  That surprised me.

  We had been talking for a long time. The moon had moved some distance in its circuit. The ever-present wind plucked at my stole; behind us the stream sang to itself. Before my tent, Reanu watched.

  What I said next rose naturally out of what had already passed between us. Or so it seemed to me then. Now, writing it, I am not so sure.

  “You have discovered in yourself a truth of history, Gyalo Amdo Samchen. Or, more accurately, a truth that history has lost.”

  He raised his eyes, which had been fixed on his clasped hands. “What truth?”

  “That it is the soul that corrupts shaping, and not shaping that corrupts the soul. The free Shapers before the Shaper War, and the pagan Shapers who fought it, were not mad. But the horrors of the War gave rise to rumors of corruption and insanity, and it served our purpose, the Brethren’s purpose, to let those rumors stand. The more the common people feared free shaping, the more possible it was to bring shaping into the keeping of the church. The more Shapers feared their own ability, the less likely it was that they would stray. We did not yet know, you see, how manita binds those who use it. Unfortunately, memories fade, and even immortal beings are vulnerable to prejudice. Many of my Brothers and Sisters have come to believe genuinely in the corrupting power of an untethered gift.”

  He sat silent in the flooding moonlight. His face, his hands, every part of him was completely still. I did not have the sense that he was shocked or angry or even particularly surprised. Yet there was something in the way he looked at me that made me—me, Sundit of the Brethren—want to look away.

  “So Shapers are taught a lie,” he said at last. “So that they may fear and hate the power in themselves. The power that was the god’s own gift to humankind.
”

  “One untruth, to uphold a far greater good. The danger of shaping is not a lie. The damage it did during the War was not a lie. The need to contain it is not a lie.”

  “Did you reveal the truth to the Shapers you freed to march on Refuge?”

  “No,” I said.

  “That was not the first time, was it. Refuge was not the first time you released Shapers to do your will.”

  I think from the beginning I had known that it was more than curiosity that had drawn me out to him. But I cannot say how or when the balance between us had changed so greatly—to make what he asked seem judgment, and my answer, my honest answer, confession.

  “No. It was not the first time.”

  “How many other times?”

  “Seven,” I said. “Only seven.”

  “Only seven? So you who made the law do not consider yourselves bound by it.”

  “In extremity, the law must sometimes be stretched.”

  “Stretched! Is that what you call it? Did you execute them, too, when you were done with them, those other Shapers?”

  Of course we did. They knew what he knows: that there is a hidden world, not merely of their gift but of the Brethren’s counsel. Mere apostates can be confined and dosed with manita, but there is no drug that can undo that other knowledge. I did not say this, however. I did not say anything at all.

  He watched me. Once again, I felt judged. And here is the strange thing, perhaps the strangest thing about this strange evening (and perhaps I should not even write it down, but in these journals where I set the whole of my soul upon the page, I cannot lie, as I so often do in speech and action): His judgment did not anger me. Instead, it weighed on me, pressed on me, so that my muscles tensed and my breath came short. As if he somehow had the right to judge. As if I was required to bear his judgment.