The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  “Go,” he said.

  She did not blink. She did not move.

  “Go! Go on, get out. Take Parvâti and leave. Right now. Before I change my mind.”

  Her mouth opened; then it snapped closed. She reached around to lift Parvâti, who woke and whimpered. She slid off the bed and padded swiftly toward the open door, where the glow from the torches in the courtyard below cast a faint illumination across the tiles.

  “Wait!”

  She went to immobility all in an instant, like an animal. She did not move a muscle as he approached. Parvâti was still whimpering, fretful at the sudden wakening, squirming against her mother’s hold. He reached out and set a crooked finger against his daughter’s cheek, tracing the soft curve of it. He brushed the rumpled hair from her brow. She quieted and looked up at him with slow-blinking, sleepy eyes, frowning a little. He could always quiet her.

  “Little bird,” he whispered. She made a sound, then raised her fist and stuffed it in her mouth. He felt as if he had been pierced through the heart. How could he let her go?

  But he could not keep her. Of all the souls in the world, hers alone he did not wish to damn by his blasphemy or his downfall.

  He laid his palm on her forehead, then stepped back. “Wait a minute,” he told Axane.

  He returned to the bed. He threw back the covers, dragged off the blanket and spread it on the floor. He tossed onto it items from the big basket in which Axane kept Parvati’s things and her own: gowns, chemises, linens. Axane’s shoes. Clumsily, he folded over the ends and rolled it up, then carried it to Axane and helped her grip it under her arm. Her quilted jacket he draped over her shoulders. She watched him all the while, her face very still—her quiet face, her secret face, the face behind which she hid.

  “This isn’t for you,” he said. “I don’t care about you. But I want her taken care of properly.” Then, when she stood unmoving: “Get out!”

  She did not hesitate. He heard her bare feet on the gallery. By the time she reached the stairs, she was running.

  He stood where he was, trying to make his mind a void so he would not have to think about what he had done, about how she had been so eager to escape him that she had been ready to dash into the winter night without her shoes, in her chemise. After a while he sat down on the floor, because he no longer had the strength to stand.

  A shadow eclipsed the dim light from the doorway. “Beloved One,” Ardashir said. “The woman. She—”

  “I told her she could go.”

  “You don’t want me to detain her?”

  “No. Let her go.”

  Ardashir turned and spoke briefly to someone standing out of sight. That person departed. Ardashir remained. “Beloved One,” he said, soft. “What has happened?”

  Râvar said nothing. Ardashir advanced a little way into the room.

  “Beloved One, I know something is amiss. Please tell me what it is, so I can help you.”

  “You can’t help me.”

  “In the Evening City—did the Brethren repudiate you? I told you, Beloved One, I told you they were not to be trusted.”

  “They bowed down to me. They acknowledged me. They called me by my name.”

  “Then what—”

  “It’s too late, Ardashir. There’s too much … I don’t know what comes next.”

  “Beloved One.” Ardashir crouched down in front of him. On his ugly face was a look of mortal dread. “I don’t understand. Tell me what to do.”

  Râvar shook his head. He thought of Parvâti, of Axane running for the stairs. He dropped his face into his ruined hands and began to weep, great tearing sobs that felt as if they damaged something inside him.

  There was a frozen pause. Then arms came round him. He felt himself drawn against the warmth of a broad chest. Fingers tangled in his hair, a touch as delicate, as tentative as Axane’s.

  “Hush,” Ardashir murmured, rocking him like a child. “Hush, beloved. Hush.”

  Râvar leaned into the First Disciple’s shoulder and wept, not for himself, not for all the loss and failure, but because at the end of everything he should be left with a man like Ardashir.

  Part V

  AWAKENING

  24

  Gyalo

  GYALO LAY IN the Burning Land, breathing the parched air of the desert, its dust and grit sharp against his skin. High overhead, the sun raged down. A shadow blocked it: Teispas, tangled hair falling around his face, blood from his lash wounds curling like red ribbon down his arms. He gripped Gyalo’s shoulder—the sound shoulder, the one that did not ache. Wake up, he said, urgency harsh in his voice. You’ve overslept. Gyalo tried, but could not rise. Teispas tightened his grip and shook him, and said again, Wake up. Wake up. Wake—

  “—up, Brother. Time to start the day.”

  “I can’t,” Gyalo mumbled, realizing even as he did that the desert was a dream, and that the hand on his shoulder belonged to Diasarta.

  “Come on, now. You know you’ll be angry with me if I let you sleep.”

  “Sorry.” Gyalo rubbed his eyes. “Sorry, Dasa. I was dreaming.”

  “I’ve made us breakfast.” Diasarta got to his feet.

  Gyalo lay a moment, letting the last of the dream slip away. He felt the dull ache in his left shoulder that was always with him now—a pain that carried a sense of invasion, as if the arrow were still embedded in his flesh. The arrowhead had been barbed; Diasarta had had to cut it out, a procedure for which Gyalo thankfully had been unconscious.

  Sun slanted into the kitchen of the abandoned farmstead in which they had spread their bedrolls the night before. As with other dwellings they had passed since Ninyâser, it had been abandoned in hope of return, with boards nailed across the door and windows to deter intruders. Unlike many, it had escaped the depredations of Râvar’s followers. Diasarta had pried some of the boards loose so they could climb in through a window. It seemed wrong to use the beds of the family that had lived there, so they camped on the floor of the kitchen, building a fire in the clay stove for warmth. Among the many items the farmstead’s occupants left behind were cooking implements and a larder full of food. They had eaten well the night before, and would again this morning, judging by the smell of whatever Diasarta was preparing.

  Gyalo rose stiffly from his blankets. He folded them and rolled them up and tied them to his pack, simple procedures made awkward by the still-limited use of his left arm. He stamped into his boots and sat down at the table, where Diasarta was setting out their meal: bowls of rice boiled with pickled vegetables and dried meat, cups of strong tea.

  “Eat it all,” Diasarta ordered.

  Gyalo obeyed, though his hunger was satisfied long before the bowl was empty. In the fever that had wracked him after his injury, the very thought of food had made him sick, and his appetite had not yet recovered. He had come close to death. Like the phantom arrow in his shoulder, the sense of that was still with him, a chill beneath his heart, a shadow at the corner of his eye, keeping him always conscious of the understandings he had gained on that dark journey, or perhaps by his return from it—he was not sure.

  When they were done, Diasarta cleaned and stowed away the dishes and utensils and doused the fire in the stove. He had already filled their waterskins and packed a bag of supplies. For some time, Gyalo had been strong enough to shape, but Diasarta, ever protective, tried to spare him as much as possible. On his palm Gyalo shaped a lump of gold, and laid it on the table—payment for the shelter and the food. They climbed through the window again. Diasarta pounded the boards back in place, then helped Gyalo don his pack, adjusting the padding that cushioned Gyalo’s wounded shoulder. They set off down the track, heading back to the Baushpar road.

  They had been journeying steadily for nearly two months, ever since Gyalo, over Diasarta’s objections, decided he was well enough to travel. They walked in Râvar’s footsteps, wit
ness to his works: the long straight passage he had carved through the fallen hills, the enormous plaque of banded sandstone he had clapped down upon the Plain of Ninyâser like the lid of a crypt. It was impossible not to be awed by those great shapings—an abstract awe, separate from Râvar and the reasons for their making, as might be felt in the aftermath of some hugely destructive natural event. They marked the growing violence of the Awakened City’s progress, encountering it first in the city of Abaxtra, where large portions of the suburbs had been vandalized and burned. It was also in Abaxtra, its walls hung with mourning cloths painted with Santaxma’s likeness, that they heard the first whispered rumors that the King had not died as the official announcements said—that he had met a horrifying fate in an encounter with a renegade Shaper, or (depending on who was whispering) that he had received judgment at the hands of the Next Messenger.

  The words Râvar had spoken in the caverns were often in Gyalo’s mind: I want you to watch as I bring ruin upon your world—you, who brought ruin on mine. It was as painful a punishment as Râvar could have wished. Though he was often tempted to avoid the empty villages, to pass by the looted houses, to turn away from the marks of Râvar’s power, Gyalo forced himself to look, to look and to remember—an affirmation of purpose, a seal on his intent.

  He thought often also of Sundit. Did her body lie beside the King’s? He hoped not. He hoped she had heeded him and saved herself.

  In Ninyâser, littered and battered from the Awakened City’s sojourn, the Great South Way ended. Gyalo and Diasarta moved on along the Baushpar road. Except for the Way, engineered for the ages from great slabs of stone, it was the best road in all Arsace, built and maintained by the church. The pilgrimage had undone most of the careful repair work with which the Brethren had remedied the damage of the Caryaxist years; the ash-and-gravel surface was pocked and scarred, the cleared verges strewn with trash and debris. The surrounding countryside was largely empty, homes and villages abandoned; alternatively, people had turned their dwellings into armed encampments. Gyalo and Diasarta, mistaken for Râvar’s faithful, were several times chased off with stones and staves. There were also those who for the same reason welcomed them, offering shelter and food—which Diasarta, ever pragmatic, insisted they accept, despite Gyalo’s distaste for the pretense such hospitality required. In one town, an entire monastery had converted; claiming shelter on the basis of their pilgrim marks, Gyalo and Diasarta attended a Communion ceremony, which the monastery’s Shapers had adapted to reflect their new understanding of rata awake. Gyalo, remembering the similarly altered ceremony he had seen in Refuge, was struck yet again by the irony of Râvar’s blasphemy—which in perpetuating his false claim of Messengerhood also, strangely, proclaimed the truth. For rata was risen. The end times had come. The world did stand upon the cusp of change.

  They were close to the holy city: four days’ travel, perhaps a little more. Gyalo felt the pull of it all the time, of what waited for him there, a barb hooked into his heart, a thread wound up a little tighter with each mile that fell behind. In his sleep, Teispas harried him. Make haste, the captain urged. Time is short. And sometimes, as this morning: Awake! Awake!

  It had been clear at dawn, but by midafternoon the sky was patched with cloud. A chill wind sprang up; Gyalo fastened the ties of his jacket, which he had let hang open in the unexpected warmth of noon, and adjusted his pack, trying to ignore the grinding ache in his shoulder. Some distance ahead, where the road curved out of sight around a hill, he could just see the green glint of a lifelight coming into view from the opposite direction, vivid against the dark surface of the road. In the past few days they had begun to overtake stragglers from the Awakened City, but only rarely had they seen anyone traveling the other way.

  “You all right, Brother?” Diasarta asked. “It’s near evening. We could find a place to stop.”

  “I’m well enough.”

  It was not really true, but he hated the weakness that still troubled him. Diasarta, who had a finely judged sense of when to impose his will and when to keep silent, did not argue.

  Gyalo watched the traveler’s slowly enlarging lifelight. As always when he glimpsed an emerald aura, his heart had begun to beat uncomfortably fast, a reaction he knew was foolish, given the impossibility of the hope attached to it. He imagined he could make out sapphire as well, and the suggestion of other colors … Don’t be ridiculous, he told his agitated pulse; you know it can’t be her. Yet it was such a strong light, and so restless. And there was blue amid the green, he could definitely see it now …

  And then he was running, his body understanding what his mind still could not believe. His pack banged on his back; he paused to drag it off and ran on. She was running, too—and he knew it was she, knew beyond any doubt, not just in the great glorious cloud of color she carried with her but by her shape within it, by the way she moved—and then by her face, which he had dreamed of and longed for and imagined so intensely the past eight months that for a moment he felt himself slide out of the world and into another place entirely, and his head spun and he stumbled and might have fallen if she had not reached him just at that moment and caught him beneath the arms and held on to him, weeping and laughing at the same time, saying his name over and over.

  “What,” he stammered. “How …?”

  “He let us go. He let us go.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  Axane reached up and pulled his face down to hers and kissed him. His senses spun away again into that other place. It was Chokyi who recalled them, setting up a rising wail from her cocoon on Axane’s back. They broke apart; he helped her untie the blanket she had twisted into a makeshift carrier. “Little bird,” he said, reaching toward the baby—who was not a baby any longer, but a sturdy little girl—but she only screamed louder, and shrank away from him. Axane lifted her, settled her against her shoulder.

  “She doesn’t remember me,” Gyalo said, feeling a twist of pain within the currents of his joy.

  “She will. Give her time.”

  “She’s gotten so big!”

  “That’s what children do.” Axane gave a laugh that turned into a sob. “Oh, Gyalo, Gyalo!”

  And he put his arms around her again, around both of them, and they knelt together in the middle of the road and found that place, that place as large, and as small, as the three of them.

  At last Gyalo remembered Diasarta. The ex-soldier was standing where Gyalo had left him, obviously waiting to be summoned. Gyalo got to his feet and beckoned. Diasarta limped forward, picking up Gyalo’s abandoned pack. Still holding Chokyi, Axane rose and went to meet him, and kissed him full on the mouth.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Diasarta was speechless. His scarred face burned.

  They made camp in a stand of trees a few hundred paces off the road. Diasarta went to gather wood for a fire. “No, no,” he said, when Gyalo made to go with him; “you’ve been apart from them long enough.” Then, gripping Gyalo’s arm: “I’m happy for you, Brother.”

  Gyalo untied his bedroll and spread the blankets on the ground so Axane could sit with Chokyi. He crouched before them. From the shelter of Axane’s arms, Chokyi regarded him with mistrust.

  “Don’t you remember me at all, little bird?” he coaxed. “I used to hold you when you cried. I used to carry you on my shoulder. Don’t you remember me, Chokyi?”

  “She’s forgotten her name.”

  “Her name? Why?”

  “He renamed her. Parvâti.” Axane said it with loathing. “His mother’s name. I swore I’d never use it.”

  “She’s beautiful.” And she was, with her amber skin and delicate features, Axane’s curling hair and Râvar’s green eyes.

  “Do you hear that, my sweet? You have an admirer.”

  Chokyi tipped her head back and looked owlishly up into her mother’s fac
e. They were both dirty, and Axane’s fatigue was palpable, but otherwise they seemed remarkably well. Gyalo could see no sign of neglect or abuse. There were abuses, though, that did not show …

  “Axane, why did he let you go?”

  “I told you. I don’t know.”

  “There has to be a reason.”

  “Something happened, I think, in the Evening City. He went there the night we reached Baushpar. When he came back he was … he seemed to be … in despair.”

  “Did he find the Brethren gone?”

  “No. They were there.”

  So Sundit had not survived to warn them. “He succeeded, then.”

  She shook her head. “He said he left them living.”

  Gyalo was incredulous. “Living? Do you think it’s true?”

  “Yes. Yes, I believed him.”

  “But why? Did he tell you why?”

  “I don’t care why. My little bird and I are free, and with you.” She gave a laugh that was half a sob. “That’s all that matters.”

  “Oh Axane. Can you ever forgive me?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “For what, my love?”

  “For leaving you.” He could hardly say it. “For being too late at Dracâriya.”

  “What are you talking about? You were almost killed at Dracâriya! Gyalo, I prayed you wouldn’t follow me. I prayed you’d stay in Ninyâser. When I dreamed you coming after me … oh, I was so frightened! I used to shout at you in my Dreams to go back. And then … when I dreamed you wounded … I almost gave myself away that night. I almost did.”

  Her voice broke. He reached out, gripped her free hand. She closed her fingers tightly around his.

  “He had some idea I would be glad he’d stolen me. That I was ready to fall in love with him at last.” She did not look at him. Her voice was very soft. “He was so angry when he saw it wasn’t so! And when he realized you and I had married—” She caught her breath. “Oh, he fell into such a rage. I think if it had been just me, he would have had his people do away with me, or maybe left me behind in the caverns with the Daughter Sundit. But he wanted Chokyi, and he kept me for her sake. While we were in the caverns, I was prisoned in one of his rooms—he barely let me set a foot outside it. He was careful when we began to travel, too. Whenever he slept or wasn’t there to watch us he’d make some sort of … transparent cage out of the air. But in the coach he left me free, and also sometimes when he was with us in the tent. If I’d been on my own I would have watched for a chance to run. With Chokyi, it was too much of a risk. But I began to think that maybe … maybe I could find a way to kill him. As I should have done before, in the Burning Land.”