The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  “Curse you!” he shouted, digging his fingers into the tresses of his hair, dragging at the careful cord knots Axane had made. “Curse you, curse you!”

  Before him on their knees, they waited for their fate. Of them all only the Bearer, who had risen to his feet when Baushtas began to speak, remained standing, the child Son in his arms, his gaze turned not on Râvar but his spirit-siblings, his broad face still as stone. Directly opposite, Vivaniya stared into Râvar’s eyes with the helpless fixity of an animal. A small red bonfire burned in both dark irises—a reflection of Râvar’s garment of illusion, of his phantom flames. And all at once a great horror flew out of the night and caught Râvar by the throat, and he knew that these were not his fires at all, that it was not a human man who crouched before him but something else, some thing with a flat pale face and ember eyes and behind them a darkness deeper than the void of night. He knew it was indeed as he had believed in childhood and young manhood, the visceral understanding that all his recent experience, all his painfully gathered empirical knowledge, had never quite managed to unseat: This world was a realm of dark illusion, a province of dreams and demons. All this time, insisting to himself it was a true world, he had been wrong.

  And then, just as swift, the understanding shifted, and he saw that the illusion—all of it—belonged to him.

  A veil seemed to fall across his senses. He rose from where he knelt and left the Brethren behind, passing from the light and shadow of the pavilion into the moon- and starlight of the court. A great shouting greeted him; he threw up his arms in an instinctive gesture of defense. Confused, he saw a field of black below him, and across it a river of varicolored light. His followers. In the pavilion, he had entirely forgotten them, waiting for him to emerge triumphant. Waiting for him to go down to them, so they could bear him away. He felt their love, their awful tearing love.

  No. Panic filled him. I can’t.

  He summoned his shaping will. With a dazzle of transformation, a roar of change, he stepped out upon the air. He walked above them, each footstep a new collision of the elements, a solitary storm. They reached toward him, a thousand separate souls howling with a single voice—the beast he had heard at night, breathing beyond his tent. He hastened, wanting only to escape.

  23

  Râvar

  IT HAD BEEN instinct to take to the air, but beyond the great court it became necessity, for on foot he could never have found his way through the maze of the Brethren’s palace, or negotiated the walled avenues of Baushpar—even if he had been able to go unnoticed among the crowds. The city spun below him like an ornament crafted by a mad jeweler, spangled with a thousand hues and strengths of light. What reasons would those below invent, what tales would they tell, of his tumultuous passage overhead? He did not know, or care.

  Under ordinary circumstances he would not have been able to pick out the villa from those around it, even from above, for lamps had been lit in many of the formerly vacant dwellings beyond Baushpar’s walls. But his followers kept vigil outside his residence, and the clotted brilliance of that crowd guided him. He skimmed above them, glimpsing the upturned faces, the yearning arms. He stepped over the walls, and trod the topmost branches of the winter-bare trees. Before the house he allowed himself to descend. He misjudged his trajectory—something he had never done in the caverns—and staggered as he struck the ground. Ardashir sprang forward from the shadow of the portico, where he had been standing exactly as Râvar had left him.

  “Beloved One! I’m here.”

  Râvar wanted only to be alone. He stumbled past the First Disciple up the steps, his legs shaking with fatigue and the dregs of panic. The Twentymen on guard before the doors hurried to pull them open. He passed into the lamp-flickering dimness of the hall. Not till that moment did he realize he still wore his flame-illusion. He quenched it like a blown candle. The hall became dimmer still.

  “Beloved One.” Ardashir spoke from behind, alarm sharp in his voice. “What has happened? Are you hurt?”

  Râvar halted. From a great depth he dredged up words. “Don’t disturb me.”

  “Beloved One …?”

  “I want … not to be disturbed. Until I say.”

  Ardashir said something, some protest or question, but Râvar had ceased to listen. He trudged down the hall and into the courtyard, where the stair led up to the second floor. He began to climb; when his feet tangled in the trailing skirts of his robe, he wrenched at the laces and shed it like a skin, leaving it where it fell. He gained his room and closed the door and swung the latch into place. He set his shoulders against the wood and allowed himself to slide to the floor. He sat there, knees raised, hands splayed loose at his sides.

  Alone. Out of sight, out of reach.

  The heavy links of the necklace dragged at his neck. He removed it, let it drop, hearing the clash of metal, the chime as the crystal struck the tiles. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. His limbs felt loose and light; there was a hollowness at his center, as always after a large release of power. The rage and panic that had taken him in the pavilion were gone, blown out like a violent storm. In their aftermath he did not feel the despair or confusion he might have expected, but rather a high, clear calm, as if his mind, like this empty chamber, had been swept clean. He seemed to stand before himself, before his deeds. Like a man emerging from a forest onto a broad flat plain, he gazed upon his own inner landscape, and knew he had never seen so far before and might never find himself again at such a point of vision.

  In the pavilion he had cursed rata, certain in that moment that the horrible twisting of his intent was the god’s work, that the punishment he had dared and challenged again and again had come on him at last, a most exquisite and subtle retribution. But the great sense of observation, the breathless certainty of attention that had seized him as the drums bore him into the Evening City was gone, as if it had never been. In the familiar, echoing emptiness he had to ask himself if he had imagined it, created it whole out of the noise and the light and the unbearable anticipation, the jubilation of the crowd, the memories of Refuge that had come to him so vividly. And if rata had not been present then, why should he be present in any of it? Why should anything but the emptiness and the silence be the truth? If the god had turned his face away from Râvar’s first great blasphemy, the fall of Thuxra, why should he turn toward any of the others?

  No godly intervention, anyway, was required to explain how things had gone so wrong. Râvar and Râvar alone had made those disastrous choices. Because he had so wanted Refuge’s destroyer to watch as Refuge was avenged, because it had so delighted him to imagine the false Messenger’s impotence, his fury, and most of all his understanding, he had not decreed Gyalo Amdo Samchen’s death but let him go free. Because he who had slain hundreds from a distance had not had the stomach to take a dozen lives face-to-face, he had not killed the Daughter Sundit and her people, but walled them up instead to die. From those two errors had sprung the downfall of his plans. The flight of more than half the Brethren. The premature revelation of his identity, which had somehow sparked the travesty of belief professed by those who remained.

  And perhaps even without those errors he would have failed. He had questioned a great deal as he built his legend and planned his journey, but one thing he had never doubted: that all the Brethren would be waiting when he arrived. That assumption had always been in him, unfounded and unquestioned, like a promise he had been given—or a promise he had made himself, as if, godlike, he could bend the world to his desire. He would have assumed it, he thought, even without Vivaniya’s conversion, which he had regarded simply as a way of accomplishing in advance some part of the labor of convincing them to acknowledge him. In the preternatural clarity of his present state of mind, that assumption now seemed insane. Even if Sundit had not survived, had not returned to speak against her Brother, was it not certain that at least some would have rejected Vivaniya’s words and sought saf
ety beyond Baushpar? They had fled the Caryaxists—why should they not flee him, who had killed their King, who had occupied Ninyâser, whose followers burned villages and massacred unbelievers?

  But it wouldn’t have had to be all of them. Just most of them. Surely that would have been enough.

  But most of them was not the vow he had made. And in the pavilion, he had not been able to accomplish even that. They had surrendered, surrendered utterly, and he had not struck them down. He had fled. Like a child, he had turned around and run away.

  His eyes sprang open. Someone—Ardashir, no doubt—had brought in a brazier, and a little light rose from the coals, stirring with heat patterns. The tiles were hard under his buttocks, and cold beneath his hands. Outside, he could hear the pilgrims at the gates, their voices rising in the cadences of some hymn.

  What if nothing had gone wrong? If he had made no mistakes. If all the Brethren had been gathered as he wished, if they had bowed down in ignorance as he planned, if he had opened their eyes as he intended. If in the moment of their greatest despair he had cast them into the earth, torn down their gilded pavilion and toppled their rata-images and laid waste their great brass-netted court, made rubble of the Evening City and walked out to his followers over the debris, triumphant … What then? For so long Baushpar had been the pinnacle of his aspiration. As when he crossed the Burning Land with Axane, dreaming of destroying Thuxra City, he had not often thought of what would come after. More marching? More destruction? More harangues by Ardashir, more confrontations with his hungry faithful? More endless hours in the coach with Axane? More sleepless nights in his tent? And for how long? Months? Years? Until they finally found him out? Until he died?

  It appalled him.

  But it wouldn’t have been like that, he thought. He would have been exalted with achieved purpose. He would have been transported with the certainty of retribution, with the rightness of having turned Refuge’s destroyers into dust. The triumph of it would have filled the emptiness. Surely that would have transformed everything. Surely nothing could have been the same.

  Yet had he not felt triumph after he buried Santaxma? After he swept into Ninyâser? Had not those triumphs drained away, like sand through cupped hands, leaving him unchanged?

  It felt like betrayal even to frame such thoughts. Not simply to think that avenging his murdered people could bring anything less than lasting triumph, but because it implied that he had pursued vengeance for himself. For his own pain, his own rage. For the hole in him, the desperate need for something to believe in.

  Unbidden, Axane’s words returned to him, the words she had spoken on the night of her arrival: Do you think it’s what they would have wanted?

  “It is,” he said aloud, bowing his face onto his knees, his fingers closing uselessly against the tile. “It wasn’t for me. It was never for me.”

  The unnatural calm had fled. Despair filled him, and awful, burning shame—for his mistakes, for his failure. Memories unfolded behind his eyes, the same memories that had come to him so ecstatically a few hours earlier, unbearable now in their reproach. In the smoky dark, he remembered the fouled riverbank, the scourge of the sun, the madness of the flies. Horror all around him, and in his heart the unanswerable accusation of the slain: Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

  He had buried his dead. He had left the riverbank. He had forced himself to go forward: sworn his vow, made his plan, followed his purpose. It was no different now. He could go on. He could return to the Evening City and have the remaining Brethren seized. He could send his people after the rest. Eventually he would find them; there was nowhere for them to go but Galea, and they could not hide forever. It would not be what he had wanted, but it would be vengeance of a kind. He would need explanations, justifications, new doctrine—but he had made up so many tales already. Why not one more? A hundred more? His people would believe him. They always did.

  Or …

  He could say nothing. Do nothing.

  He could … stop.

  Everything in him went still. Glinting like a mirage on the far horizon of his inner self, he seemed to see the possibility of an entirely different path. Not a new idea, not at all—had not Axane spoken it only hours earlier? Had she not spoken it on the night she arrived in the caverns? It had not touched him then, or since. It had not been real. But now … To be finished, he thought. To let go. To abandon everything, even his vow. To simply … make an end.

  He did not know how long he sat there, motionless, barely breathing. At last, drawn by an impulse he did not wish to question or to name, he pushed to his feet and left his room. He slipped along the gallery. At Axane’s door he banished the barrier and went inside.

  She was awake, sitting up in bed, roused perhaps by the small sound of the barrier’s unmaking. Parvâti slept undisturbed beside her. A lamp with a pierced cover burned on a table near the bed, its weak wash of yellow light mostly swallowed by the tempest of her colors. Her face as she looked at him was controlled and still; but the coverlets, clutched up in both her fists, told a different story. To reassure her, he did not approach too close, halting well short of the bed.

  “What,” she whispered, as on the night after he had killed Santaxma. “What did you do?”

  He let out his breath. “Nothing.” She stared at him. “Really. I didn’t do anything. They’re still alive, the ones who were there. I didn’t touch them.”

  Her lips parted. “Why?” she said at last.

  How could he explain? Shame twisted in him. He shook his head.

  “Is it—” She paused. “Is it over?”

  “I made so many mistakes, Axane. I’ve failed everyone. In Refuge … now.” Grief rose up, a scalding tide. “I only wanted to atone—to make it right—”

  She pushed back the covers, swung her legs onto the floor. She wore only a chemise; her arms were bare, and her unbound hair fell heavy on her shoulders and across her breasts.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “They were my people, too.”

  “How can the world be like this, Axane? How can rata—” He lost the words for a moment. “I used to think he was cruel. But now I think … he simply isn’t watching. How can you … how can you even blaspheme against a god who doesn’t care?”

  “I used to think that.” Her great eyes held his. “That he was indifferent. But now … Maybe he was here once, and left us long ago. Maybe he never existed at all. But one thing I know, one thing I know for certain—now, today, there is no god in this world.” She paused, then said with a kind of wonder: “I’ve never said that out loud before.”

  “Doesn’t it frighten you?”

  “No.” And again, as if she had just discovered it: “No.”

  “Do I frighten you?”

  She looked at him, her hands closed on the edge of the mattress. And the same instinct that had brought him to the room rose up again, propelling him toward her, pressing him to his knees, bowing his head into her lap, his cheek turned on her thighs. She made no sound; her whole body jerked rigid. He did not move. Slowly at first, then all at once, her muscles softened. Her hands descended, light as leaves, to rest upon his hair.

  He drew a long shuddering breath. She smoothed his hair away from his face. He lay passive, his eyes half-closed, smelling her scent. To be within her light was like entering another world, like stepping sideways into a different stream of time. The pleasure of her touch was exquisite, a bliss that contained nothing carnal. He had not been able to stop himself from wanting her, but he had never permitted himself to long for this—for kindness, for comfort. For just these moments, he let those barriers go.

  Through the metamorphic sheen of cobalt and emerald he could see the wall behind the bed, revealed by the low yellow light of the lamp. Its mural of ferns and birds was interrupted by a chest pushed up against it. Dreamily he traced the patterns of the painting—more restfu
l than many of the patterns of this world, for the design was a repeating one—and underneath, the patterns of the plaster: its composition, its thickness, the invisible net of stresses that marked the places where it would one day crack. They clustered especially above the chest, spidering up from behind it as if there had been some impact there.

  It came to him all at once what he was seeing. The understanding penetrated his warm trance like a slow flood of cold water. He pulled back, barely noticing as Axane’s hands slid away, and got to his feet. He went to stand before the chest.

  “Râvar,” she said quietly, an admission as good as words.

  He set his foot against the chest and shoved it aside, revealing a swath of wall where the plaster had been chipped away, in some places down to the strips of wood that supported it. For a moment he stared at it.

  “Where did you put the plaster, Axane?”

  She sighed. “In the chest.”

  “How did you know I wouldn’t be in the room you would have come out in?”

  “I heard you talking to Ardashir. I knew your room was at the front of the house.”

  He felt no anger, only a heavy disappointment. At last he was able to admit to himself the hope that had brought him to her room, the same futile hope that had tormented him since he was a boy of fourteen. It would not be so bad to stop, he had thought, if he could stop with her, with Parvâti. If they could become a family, find refuge in this world as their ancestors had found refuge in the Burning Land. What had he been thinking? He knew better than to imagine she would give him such a thing; he needed no hole in the wall to tell him that. And even if that were not so … he hated this world. He had no desire to live in it.

  Which was, of course, the crux of everything. For that was what came after—after Thuxra. After Baushpar. After whatever else he chose to do: living, surviving in this world.

  He turned. She sat very still, her hands once more closed on the mattress.