“No.” Sundit took a step forward. “You mistake me. Râvar is false, that is certain. But my Brothers’ lie remains, and the light they saw, the golden light. And you, the news you brought us. I’ve spent much time, these past weeks, thinking about what it may mean.”
Gyalo’s palms were burning again. “Are you saying... that you’ve come to believe me? To believe that rata has risen?”
“I do not know what else to think.”
“Now!” He had to strain against the constriction in his throat. “You believe me now! When it does no good! When it’s so much too late!”
Once again she did not try to defend herself. She stood silent, her body braced as if against a wind: a small, sturdy woman enclosed in a shell of sapphire light, who bore within her fragile flesh twelve hundred years of memory, of knowledge and benevolence and ruthlessness and cruelty. In that moment she did not seem the arrogant vessel of those years, but bowed beneath their weight. It came to him, in a burst of recognition that turned his rage to ash, that she was afraid. Not of what was to come, or of anything outside that room. Of what was there.
Of him.
Their eyes held. Understanding passed between them in the singing silence.
He broke the gaze, turning without a word, and left her. This time, she did not call after him.
Reanu led the way to the stables, his broad body like a shield. A sleepy ostler challenged them, but was happy enough, when he recognized Reanu’s tattoos, to return to his bed. Reanu stood by, holding a lantern, while Gyalo led out the mare he had ridden into Ninyâser and saddled her. She stamped and nickered, puzzled to be out of her warm stall in the middle of the night. Her solid presence, the familiar motions of readying her, calmed him, allowed him to dismiss Sundit and what he had seen in her face, to shut her from his mind. To turn his thoughts instead to what lay ahead.
He tightened the girth a second time and swung into the saddle. Reanu held up a leather wallet.
“The silver.”
Gyalo took it and stowed it in one of his saddlebags. “Thanks.”
“You’re going back, aren’t you. For your wife and child.”
“Yes.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
“You’ll need it.” Reanu regarded Gyalo from behind the inked ferocity of his tattoos. “You’re not what I thought, apostate. Not what I thought at all.”
“I’m glad to have confounded your prejudice.”
Reanu nodded slowly, though it was not clear what he was acknowledging.
“Great is rata.” Gyalo looked the big man in the eye. “Great is his Way.”
“Go in light.” A pause. “Gyalo.”
17
Gyalo
HE DROVE THE mare as hard as he dared along the Great South Way. When she went lame south of the town of Hâras, he unsaddled and unbridled her and let her free, and continued on foot, with the saddlebags over his shoulder and his bedroll tied to his back. He was grateful for Sundit’s coins, which were easier to exchange than the raw gold or silver he would have shaped for himself; with it he purchased shelter in stables or outbuildings when it rained and he could not sleep by the roadside, and bought hot meals when he tired of foods of his own creation.
An overpowering urgency filled him, an agonizing awareness of lost and wasted time. He walked from before dawn until after dark, barely conscious of fatigue, pausing for rest only because he knew his body needed it. The landscape passed as if in a dream: the rich agricultural plains of Arsace’s center, the forested regions to the south, the desolate moorland of the Dracâriya hills. Once again he did not pray, not even for strength. But he imagined the god’s attention turned on him as he traveled, incomprehensible, implacable. For the first time in his life, he did not care.
He whispered promises into Axane’s sleep: I’m coming for you. I’ll be with you soon. He dreamed of her and of Chokyi, sometimes gentle dreams drawn from their life together, sometimes violent dreams he preferred not to recall. Once she was with Teispas, walking far ahead of him, deaf to all his shouts and pleas. He woke sweating, breathless with the guilt of having failed her. Failed them.
The road’s heaviest traffic ran between Ninyâser and the town of Sardis, which lay on the banks of the river Hatane. Since Râvar and his pilgrim army were still below the river, only a few of the travelers Gyalo encountered had word of him: a long-haul carter on his way to the capital, a group of itinerant musicians, a military courier from Darna who had been in that city when the pilgrims stopped outside it and had overtaken them on his way north. “There’s well over two thousand, I’d guess,” he said, in answer to Gyalo’s question. “They took near a hundred of the townspeople with them when they stopped in Darna. You’d think they’d strip the land like locusts, but I saw no sign of that.” Nor had he seen Râvar, either at Darna or on the road, though he had heard tales. “Some say he’s a Shaper, a vow-breaker, but if that was true, you wouldn’t think he’d still be free. What times we live in, eh?” He touched his eyes in the sign of rata.
In Sardis there was word, and worry. Pausing at a cookshop, Gyalo listened as a group of men traded speculation and rumor.
“… five thousand of ’em, so the peddler said, strung out along the road for a mile and more.” The speaker, a portly man with a silver lifelight, hunched forward over his meal. “It took him half the day to get past.”
“Five thousand!” scoffed his neighbor.
“He swore it was the god’s truth.”
“The oath of a peddler. There’s something to rely on.”
“I’ve heard the stories, too,” said a third tablemate, a quiet man who wore the sash of the city guard. “There’s been many travelers through the gates these past two weeks who talk of these pilgrims.”
“Heretics, you mean.” The scoffer made the sign of rata.
“Remember those madmen who got chased out of town a few months ago?” asked a fourth man, younger than the rest. “The ones who said the Next Messenger was calling the faithful to his side? D’you think this is the same one? The same Messenger, I mean?”
“What I think,” the scoffer said, “is if I had a karshana for every villain who’s come down the road talking about miracles and wonders, I’d not have to worry about my old age.”
“What do they want, these marchers?” asked a fifth man, by his muddy clothes one of the brickmakers who mined the clay beds of the Hatane. “Where are they going?”
“To Ninyâser, to see the King,” said Silver-light.
“Baushpar’s what I heard,” the guardsman said.
“The peddler said he’s half again as tall as a regular man, the one who leads them,” Silver-light said. “With a voice like a trumpet and a face too bright to look at for more than a minute at a time. He’s got a cloak made out of light.”
“Cloak of light, my arse.” The scoffer was getting angry.
“If he’s got even half the followers these travelers say he does,” said the quiet guardsman, “they’ll put a sore burden on Sardis when they come.”
“Then you fellows had better do your bloody job for once, and turn ’em away,” snapped the scoffer.
“Yes, but …” The young man paused.
“But what?”
“What if it’s true? What if—”
“Ash of the Enemy,” the scoffer said. “You need a drink. Or a knock on the head.”
“I heard he does things,” Silver-light said. “Wonders. Storms out of clear air. Gold from the sky.”
“Maybe he turns water into beer. That’d be useful.”
“He had some, the peddler.”
“What, beer?”
“Gold. A nugget big as the end of my thumb.”
“And I’ll wager he gave you a peek at it, and told you he’d part with it for half its worth.” Silver-light hunched into himself and did not reply. �
��Burn me! You fell for it, didn’t you, you soft fool!”
“Well, we’ll see for ourselves soon enough,” the guardsman said, wrapping both hands around his cup as if to anchor himself in the world of familiar things. “For one thing’s sure, they’re moving up the Great South Way and will soon be here.”
Gyalo moved on, but the conversation remained with him. In each of the habitations he had passed through—the cities or larger towns whose names had been written in black ink on Santaxma’s map, the villages that were too small for the map to note, the farmsteads and the roadside inns—he had looked into the faces of the people and wondered which of them would welcome Râvar when he came. The men gave flesh to his uneasy speculations: the credulity of Silver-light, the uncertainty of the younger man, the apprehension of the guardsman and the brickmaker, the anger of the scoffer.
There had been no bridge at Sardis until the Caryaxists built one to carry the Great South Way over the Hatane, in one of the great feats of engineering that had marked the regime’s early years. It strode across the river on pilings like giants’ legs, more than a mile long, the water weaving complex patterns of flow and force around it. On the far side spread rolling tracts of grazing land, through which the Way ran as straight as a carpenter’s rule. A late spell of fine weather made the air almost as warm as midsummer; the shimmering meadows baked beneath a cobalt sky, and the nights were clear and filled with stars. Across that dreaming landscape, the shadow of Râvar’s imminence lay. There was talk of him in the inns and in the villages. Northbound travelers called warnings to those headed south: A train of pilgrims, big as an army. Go another way if you can.
Four days beyond the Hatane, in the fragile light of dawn, a dirty blot appeared on the southern sky. Gyalo halted, feeling a sudden pressure in his chest. The patterns were too far to read, but even so he knew that what he saw was not a thundercloud or a meadow fire, but the gathered smoke of hundreds of campsites.
The Awakened City.
He continued until the sun stood directly overhead, then left the road. Behind a stand of brush, its growth dense enough to conceal his body and its pale lifeglow enough like his pearly human colors to disguise them, he settled to wait. The afternoon crept by. Except for an occasional cart or traveler, the road lay empty. But at last, when the sun had sunk low and shadows stretched long across the grass, Râvar’s army came in sight.
A pair of horsemen rode in the vanguard; by his lightlessness, Gyalo recognized one of them as Ardashir. Next came Sundit’s coach, plodding at the slowest of paces. Another pair of riders followed, then, like a long, long plume of dust, the citizens of the Awakened City. Apart from the riders who flanked the line—all with staves and armbands, members of Ardashir’s Band of Twenty—there was no trace of the near-military order of the pilgrims’ exit from the caverns. Nor were they singing. They were just a crowd—massed and shapeless, tramping along in the dull manner of people for whom walking had become an activity as unthinking as breathing, and were propelled less by their own will than by the grinding momentum of the whole. The shuffling of their passage overwhelmed the air. Their gathered lifelights made a dazzling show; Gyalo had thought to watch for Diasarta’s parched-grass green, but in such a mass of people it was impossible to pick one light from the rest. A few went mounted, and there were a number of oxcarts and mule carts—the new converts the military courier had mentioned, perhaps. Faithful must also have been lost along the way, culled by sickness or injury or the constant labor of the journey. Even so, it seemed to Gyalo that the City, while nowhere near the size suggested by the men in the Sardis cookshop, was considerably larger than when he and Diasarta had watched it march away.
The sun had set by the time the main body of the train was past. Gyalo abandoned his concealment and returned to the road, falling in among the stragglers. Dirty and travel-worn as he was, no one questioned his presence. As full dark descended the horsemen came riding back, shouting for a halt. Wearily, the pilgrims left the road and made camp alongside. Some had shelter, tents or lean-tos rigged with poles and cloth or steppe-grass mats, but for many there was nothing but the ground and the air—no hardship, in the mild false summer, but what would become of them when the winter rains arrived?
Gyalo struck off into the meadow again, making his way up the line. To his right, across the width of the road, the City lay like a gathering of stars, little constellations of cook fires and lifelights burning bright against the paler luster of the land. He heard the sound of voices, and now and again of song; when the breeze shifted he smelled dust and woodsmoke and the miasmic whiff of too many people crowded too close together. Several times he encountered groups foraging for brush to feed their fires. They assumed him on the same errand and saluted him as a fellow convert, holding up their black-marked palms. “Great is rata,” they said. “Great is his wakened Way.” “Go in light,” he replied, showing them his own mark.
Near the procession’s head he dropped to his hands and knees, crawling forward under cover of the vegetation. The encampments of the pilgrims terminated as abruptly as if they had come up against a fence. Across a small empty distance lay Râvar’s camp: a large tent, a cluster of smaller ones. The coach had been unharnessed and drawn alongside, the horses staked out to graze. A fire burned, tended by a pair of lifelights, crimson and green. Two men with silvery colors flanked the opening of the large tent, and other life-lights moved nearby, including the shadow-glint, just visible against the dark, of Ardashir.
Gyalo crouched, his eyes fixed on Râvar’s tent. He could read its patterns like a written page—the grass cloth that composed it, the stresses of the poles and ropes that held it up. Useless information, for what mattered was what he could not see—Axane and Chokyi, imprisoned within.
Light flared abruptly inside the tent. The men on guard by the opening turned to draw back the flaps. A storm of brilliance erupted into the night. In its gemlike intensity it was a little like the radiance of life, but far larger; and it was not a single aura, or one with varied shadings, but a gathering of more than a dozen different colors, coiling and rippling like a nest of serpents. At its center a more piercing illumination, a harsh sharp gold, burned in the shape of a human figure.
Râvar.
The star trail of the procession stirred, as those who could not see their own true brightness glimpsed Râvar’s false refulgence. Pilgrims began to crowd forward, though they did not advance beyond the margin that separated Râvar’s camp from theirs. Close to them, but not too close, Râvar halted. His arms rose, parting his garment of illusion. He spoke; Gyalo could hear his voice, but could not make out the words. The air shook. Lightning catapulted from the earth. And again, and again. Shaping.
The echoes died. Râvar spoke once more, gesturing. A cry rose from the pilgrims. He stood a moment, arms spread, head tipped back; then he dropped the pose and strode back toward his tent. The guards pulled the flaps aside again. For a moment his light could still be seen, sliding across the fabric. Then, like a blown flame, it vanished.
Gyalo watched from his hiding place as Ardashir and his men settled round the fire, as food was prepared and brought to Râvar’s tent. In the pilgrim encampment, lifelights drifted in steady procession toward and away from the place where Râvar had done his shaping. At last both camps were still. Gyalo crept forward then through the wan moonlight, through the grass and underbrush whose milky glow was so much like his own, halting just short of the curbed margin of the road. He was barely aware of the breathing night around him, barely heard the stamping of the horses or the crackle of the fire, barely felt the grass against his face or the sharp throbbing in his hands. The world had contracted; it was no larger than Râvar’s tent, and the distance between it and the place where Gyalo lay watching. In the Burning Land, Râvar had forced Axane every night; he might be forcing her right then, behind the tent’s obscuring fabric. By an act of will Gyalo had excluded such thoughts as he traveled, but he was powerless ag
ainst them now. Wild impulses shook him. He would circle around, creep beneath the canvas, spirit Axane and Chokyi away while Râvar slept. He would shape fire on the grasses to draw Râvar out, and free them while Râvar was absent. He would shape lightning, as he had south of Darna, and strike Râvar to ash. If I whisper it aloud she’ll hear me, she’ll hear me in her Dreams, she’ll he ready …
He knew better than to try. All night he lay, wracked with futile hatred—of Râvar, of his own helplessness. At last, when dawn cracked the eastern sky, he stole silently back to a safer distance.
The City rose with the sun. The riders trotted along the encampment, rousing the pilgrims. Food was prepared over Râvar’s fire; Ardashir supervised the harnessing of the coach, drawing it around so its open door faced the tent’s entrance. Râvar emerged, naked of illusion, enclosed only in his own painful light. Gyalo had no time to feel more than the smallest shock of loathing—for close on his heels followed Axane. She was uncloaked. Chokyi was clearly visible, clasped in her mother’s arms.
The sight of them pierced Gyalo like a javelin, fixed him to the ground. If Râvar himself had come striding toward him, he could not have moved.
She knew he was there, certainly she knew it. But she never faltered, never glanced in his direction. Ten steps brought her to the coach. Balancing Chokyi in one arm, she grasped the strap beside the door and pulled herself inside. Briefly her light was visible through the opening. Then Ardashir slammed the door, and it was gone.
Gyalo bowed his head into his burning palms. He heard the sounds of preparation: thuds and thumps, shouts. When at last he was able to look up, the tents had been struck and the coach loaded, and the driver was pulling the horses around. As yesterday, Ardashir led the way. The other horsemen trotted down the line of the encampment, chivvying the pilgrims into motion. Slowly, with many fits and starts, the Awakened City began to move.
Gyalo rose from his hiding place and joined the stragglers again. Passing the spot where Râvar had shaped the night before, he saw a litter of grain and an area of trampled mud where water must have flowed. Sustenance for the faithful. Food of the gods.
The Awakened City Page 33