The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  The chill of it swept up in him; he shuddered.

  “And there was Dasa, who’d given me back my life, just as he gave me back my freedom when the Brethren imprisoned me in Faal. When he came for me then I saw the god’s hand in it, rata reaching out to me, giving me a second chance … this time it seemed the same. A third chance. Dasa told me what had happened, that the King had been killed and Râvar had moved on. And I saw that just as much as I had to follow you and Chokyi, I had to follow Râvar and his blasphemy. Just as much as I had to save the two of you, I had to try to put an end to him. Not for the Brethren’s sake. Not for Baushpar. Not because I want to punish him for what he did to you, though I do, I do! Because it needs to be done. Because there may be no one else to do it. I never separated it from you and Chokyi, because I never imagined any possibility you wouldn’t be with him when I reached Baushpar. But now you are free. And still I must go on. I must, Axane.”

  “Do you think,” she said out of her frozen face, “that you’ll become the Messenger in Baushpar?”

  He felt the catch, the involuntary stutter of his breath. Râvar no longer frightened him. But this—this still did. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s rata’s will for me. Maybe it isn’t. All I know is that I’m tired of asking questions. I’m tired of running away. I’m tired of thinking about it, and I’m tired of trying not to think about it. I’m tired of being afraid. Wherever rata’s hand lies in these events, I need to make a choice. Whether or not rata demands resolution of me, I demand it of myself.”

  “You are selfish,” Axane said. “You and your choices. You and your duty.”

  Anger flashed in him again. “This is what I am. You’ve always known it. I’m not capable of changing, any more than you’re capable of belief.”

  “It’s true. I don’t believe. And you—you set your shaping free. You married me. But you might as well never have left the church.”

  “No, Axane. There are things I question still, but this I know: The church’s time is past. I have most truly left it.”

  “Still you follow rata.”

  “rata and his Way are not the same.”

  Tears stood in her eyes. “He’ll kill you.”

  “I will do all I can not to let that happen.”

  “If I asked you not to go.” She drew a shuddering breath. “For my sake, for Chokyi’s sake. Would you heed me?”

  “Axane. Don’t force me to that.”

  Silence. The night flowed between them like a river. He saw her calling up her self-control, drawing down within herself, hiding her true feeling. It was as if she were already leaving him. His heart contracted with the pain of it.

  “I understand,” she said—quiet, glacially calm.

  “Do you?” he answered wearily.

  “Oh, I do. Better than you know. You’re like him. Both of you destroying yourselves for principle—him in hatred, you in duty, but really, what’s the difference?” Her voice caught on a sob, like ice cracking. “I won’t go with you. I won’t wait outside Baushpar while you kill yourself.”

  “I don’t want you to go with me. I want you to be safe. I want you to go home.”

  “Then there’s nothing more to say.” She thrust her arms roughly into the sleeves of her dress, and in a rustle of leaves got to her feet. “I’ll get Chokyi. We’ll be on our way.”

  “What? Now?”

  “Why not? There’s no reason to stay.”

  “Axane, it’s the middle of the night. It’s cold. There are terrible people on the roads. I can’t bear—” He had to stop. “Stay till morning at least. For Chokyi’s sake.”

  She turned her face away. “Very well. Till morning.”

  She set off toward the faint glow of the campfire. He fastened his disordered clothes, gathered the blanket and the sash and coat she had forgotten, and ran to catch her up. She went straight to the lean-to and lay down by Chokyi. When Gyalo draped the blanket over them both, she did not stir or open her eyes.

  He crossed to the fire, where Diasarta sat over the flames. “Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll keep watch.”

  Diasarta looked up at him. “Everything all right, Brother?”

  “No.” He sat down. “They’re leaving. In the morning.”

  “You and I are going on, then.”

  “Yes.”

  Diasarta nodded, unsurprised. He set his hand on Gyalo’s shoulder and left it there a moment, then pulled away and got to his feet. “Wake me up at moonset. You need rest, too.”

  But Gyalo sat by the fire the whole night long, and did not sleep at all.

  He walked Axane to the road. Overcast dawn was turning to sullen day. Frost crisped the grass and leaves underfoot. She carried the blanket and the bundle of her clothing and the bag of food Diasarta had packed for himself and Gyalo the day before. The two of them would survive by shaping. Gyalo held Chokyi, who, if she did not yet trust him, at least allowed the contact. He thought, with pain, that she would forget him again.

  Perhaps forever.

  They did not speak as they walked, did not speak as they reached the road, did not speak as he helped Axane fashion the blanket into a carrier for Chokyi. Chokyi gazed at him with round green eyes; when he bent to kiss her, she shrank away. Still silent, he handed Axane the bag and bundle. She slung the bag over her shoulder; the bundle she held to her breast like a shield.

  “Here.” He pulled a small cloth-wrapped packet out of the pocket of his coat. “This is for your journey.”

  “What is it?”

  “Gold and silver. Some gems.” He had shaped them the night before, while the others slept. “I made them small, you shouldn’t have trouble trading them.”

  “Thank you.” She took the packet.

  “Get well off the road at night. There are bad people about.”

  “I know.”

  “I left a key with Ciri. To the house. Some parts of Ninyâser are damaged, but mostly north of the canal. Our area was hardly touched. I checked the house while I was there.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “if that’s where I’m going.”

  It went through him like a knife. “Don’t. Don’t say that.”

  “It’ll always be this way with you, Gyalo. I knew that when I came to you … but I didn’t know how hard it would be. I don’t know … I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”

  “You are.” He reached out, put his hands on hers. “You are.”

  She only stood, her eyes cast down, her face perfectly still. It was an expression he knew well—the mask of composure behind which lived the parts of herself she did not want others to see. The mask she had made for herself in Refuge to hide the secret of her dreaming, with its burden of knowledge and fear and pain. The mask he had thought, when they were first reunited, she would cast aside forever. He thought his heart would break.

  “I love you,” he said. “I love you both so much.”

  For an instant her perfect control splintered; she sobbed once, twice. He stepped toward her, but she backed away, out of reach.

  “I dreamed last night.” Her voice was husky. “Of him. Outside his house a crowd of pilgrims was singing and praying. Inside, he lay in an empty room, curled up on the floor. He’s sick. I saw the fever sweat. He was … he was whispering the names of the dead.”

  “Axane, I will keep safe. I will come back. Please, be there when I come back.”

  Tears spilled down her cheeks. “I’ll try not to dream of you.”

  He watched them go. Except for the hours he had believed her and Chokyi dead, it was the worst pain of his life. He hoped she would pause and look back, but she did not.

  Diasarta came up beside him, carrying their packs. “Ready, Brother?”

  “She’s alone, Dasa.” In the distance, Axane and Chokyi were a flash of emerald. “The road is dangerous. What kind of man am I, to let her go like
this?”

  Diasarta placed a hand on Gyalo’s arm. “You do what you have to do, Brother. I understand.”

  I understand. Axane, too, had said those words. What she understood was not what Diasarta did, yet both believed they knew the truth. And he—what he knew, or thought he knew, was something different still. The world seemed unreal, slippery, a tissue of conjecture. There was nothing solid to hold on to.

  The emerald flash was a pinpoint. Gyalo stood, straining after it, till sparks of green whirled across his vision, and he had to close his eyes against a sudden vertigo. When he opened them, the green was gone.

  25

  Gyalo

  THAT AFTERNOON GYALO and Diasarta met a party traveling in the opposite direction, the first they had seen in many days apart from Axane and Chokyi: an elderly man, three younger men who looked to be his sons, a woman who was obviously the wife of one of them, and a small girl. They were ragged and grimy, and had a look of shock about them, like survivors of some catastrophe.

  “Pilgrims?” the husband called, as Gyalo and Diasarta drew near.

  “Yes,” Gyalo said, holding up his hand to show his mark. “Heading for the holy city, praise rata.”

  “You might want to change your mind,” said the husband. He stopped; the others clustered round him. One side of his face was bruised and swollen, and his arm was tied to his chest. “It’s bad there.”

  “Bad how?”

  “The Messenger’s in seclusion. Hasn’t come out since the night he went to the Brethren. It’s said he’s talking to the god, taking counsel for the time of Interim. But some are saying he’s turned from us—”

  “For our sins,” the wife said.

  “Not our sins, Imene. It’s not folk like us who’ve brought darkness on this pilgrimage. Others say he’s sick and is like to die. No one knows what’s true, or what’s to come next. He’s stopped providing for us—we had to take what we needed from the city. Got this”—he indicated his face— “yesterday, trying to hold on to a sack of rice.”

  “It was always going to come to this.” The old man leaned heavily on the arm of his youngest son. “I said it. I said it weeks ago.”

  “Hush, Father,” the young man said.

  “Anyway, we’re going back, if anything’s left to go back to. You might think about doing the same.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Gyalo said. “But we’ll go on.”

  The husband shrugged. “Luck to you, then. Great is rata. Great is his wakened Way.”

  “Go in light.”

  “He really is sick, then,” Diasarta said when they were out of earshot.

  “He wanted to destroy Baushpar. Perhaps he means to let his followers do it.”

  They made an early camp. Gyalo lay staring at the dark, his hand closed around Axane’s bracelet, which he had forgotten to give back during their brief reunion. A hundred times that day he had started to turn around. A hundred times he had forced himself to continue. He accepted that his course was set. Still, the questions struggled in him—was he a fool to let them go? Was anything worth their loss?

  Did she dream him? For the first time he was not sure, and not only because of her parting words. He was no longer the only soul to whom she was bound, from whom she was separated.

  Over the next days they overtook increasing crowds of pilgrim stragglers trudging toward the holy city. They also met growing numbers of people headed for Ninyâser. Many hurried by, their eyes averted. Others called warnings: There’s rioting in Baushpar. Looting and burning. Turn back. Once the companions passed a long train of ratist monks led by a group of Shapers in golden stoles, their monastery valuables piled in carts. Apart from these travelers, the countryside was empty—a desertion no different from elsewhere, but somehow, so near Baushpar, more unnerving.

  Midway through the morning of the fourth day, they crested a hill and saw Baushpar before them, its red-and-gold magnificence dulled by cloud and drizzle. Even so, the domes of the First Temple shone, drawing to themselves what light there was. Gyalo paused, taken by a memory of the first time he had ever glimpsed the holy city, riding with the returning Brethren after the Caryaxists’ fall. The domes had shone that day, too, though their gilding was mostly worn away, stripped by eighty years of neglect. The sight of it had seized him by the throat—holy Baushpar, whose representation he had seen so many times in books and paintings, real at last. It had seemed both larger and smaller, meaner and more magnificent, everything he had expected and nothing like at all. It was the same now, though for a different reason: That first time, he had looked upon a city he had never imagined he would know. This time, he looked upon a city to which he had never thought to return.

  The road led between the church’s vast manita fields, bare and dark with winter, the gauze that shaded the plants’ leathery leaves neatly rolled and tied to the posts that supported it during the growing season. As the companions neared the suburbs, the breeze brought a whiff of burning. Some of what had appeared from a distance to be mist was smoke; Gyalo read the heat patterns, breathing up from several locations outside the city walls.

  The packed ash and gravel of the Baushpar road gave way to cobblestones, and the fields to the walled estates of the wealthy. Every gate hung open or had been broken down. Here and there lay the litter of looting—torn clothing, soiled cushions, shards and splinters of porcelain, glass, wood. There was no sign of the vandals: the broad avenue was deserted.

  “Hear that, Brother?” Diasarta said.

  The sound came and went amid the pattering of the rain: a murmur as of many voices, punctuated by snatches of song. They advanced along the avenue. Around a curve, the light of life came into view—a crowd, gathered before one of the estates, the ragtag mass of it occupying nearly the entire width of the street. Some knelt in attitudes of reverence, heads bowed, wrists crossed before their faces. Some told Communion beads. Some gripped hands or linked arms, swaying to chanted prayers and hymns. All seemed oblivious to the cold and rain.

  “This is where he is,” Gyalo said.

  “What do you want to do, Brother?”

  Gyalo stared at the ornamented roof peaks of the mansion, just visible above the wall. Inside, his enemy lay: the rapist of his wife, the thief of his family, the scourge of his adopted land. He had come here to confront this man. Yet with the songs and praises of the pilgrims in his ears, he felt a strange repulsion. Not fear; he was not conscious of fear. Not doubt: It had been a long time since he had suffered any doubt. Something in him simply leaned in a different direction. It was not yet time to enter that house.

  “Let’s go on.”

  Diasarta nodded. In ordinary matters—the eating of food, the making of camp—he did not hesitate to impose his will. But true to the pledge he had made when he and Gyalo parted on the steppe, he no longer protested Gyalo’s larger decisions.

  They skirted the crowd, climbing toward the walls of the old city. The avenue narrowed as it rose; the great villas with their lush parks became tidy tile-roofed cottages with gardens at the back. Many had been boarded up. Others were simply locked and shuttered. Some had been broken into, some not; there seemed no logic in what stood open and looted and what was still intact. One of the fires raged nearby—the flames were not visible, but smoke drifted above the roofs, and the air writhed with heat.

  Ahead gaped the great slot of the Summer Gate, and beyond it the red-granite walls of the Avenue of Summer. This enclosed avenue and three others like it were the only means of access to the walled square at Baushpar’s heart, where rose the First Temple of rata. They were named for the cardinal points at which they originated: Summer, Winter, Dawn, and Sunset. Gyalo had walked the Avenue of Summer daily during his brief residence in Baushpar; that familiarity was still with him, but transformed by the freedom of his Shaper senses, which showed him not just the surfaces of things, but their substance.

  Some dist
ance ahead, firelight and lifelight flashed—a bonfire, kindled in the middle of the street. It raged between two of the archways that opened onto the side streets, undiscouraged by the drizzle, smoke pouring off it in fat black coils. The air around it was liquid with heat. People staggered out of the side streets, laden with furniture, fabric, bedding, shutters, anything flammable. A mob of spectators cheered as each new object was heaved onto the pyre.

  “Hey, pilgrims!” a woman yelled over the tearing sound of the flames. “Give something to the fire!”

  Gyalo held up his hands in a gesture of apology. “Sorry, sister. We’ve nothing to spare.”

  “That’s easy to fix,” a male pilgrim called. “Baushpar’s got plenty to spare!”

  “Join in, brothers!” cried another. “Make an offering!”

  “Not scared of fire, are you, boys?” The woman stepped toward them. “There’ll be worse than this when rata comes to make the world anew!”

  The man beside her laughed madly, grabbed her round the waist. “We’re just giving him a bit of help!”

  With a roar the center of the bonfire collapsed, belching up a terrific eruption of flames, hurling a veil of sparks higher than the walls. Gyalo saw the heat as it blasted toward him through the substance of the air. It snatched the breath out of his throat; almost, he expected the pilgrims to combust. But they seemed to care as little for roasting as those gathered outside Râvar’s house had for freezing. They danced and cheered, shouting the god’s name, yelling Râvar’s title.

  Gyalo and Diasarta retreated along the Avenue, ducking down the first side street they came upon. Only when they were certain no one was following did they pause for breath.

  “Bloody ashes,” Diasarta said.

  “We’re on the eastern side of the Avenue of Summer now.” Gyalo called on his knowledge of Baushpar—which was slim, for he had lived a bare six months in the holy city before his mission to the Burning Land. “We can cross over to the Avenue of Dawn, and get to Temple Square that way. Assuming it isn’t blocked.”