The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  “Don’t be fooled.” Râvar’s voice was hoarse, as if he had not spoken in some time. “My power is as great as it ever was. It’s all still there, inside me.” He coughed, his bony chest spasming. “Why are you here? Have you come to gloat?” He squinted. “Who’s that with you?”

  “My companion.”

  “Is he like you? Unbound?”

  “No. He’s no Shaper.”

  “It was stupid of me not to kill you. I should have, when I had the chance. Her, too, the Daughter. I meant to do it. I did. But they were … too close. So I sealed her in, thinking she would starve, but all I did was leave her for you. And you set her free, and she carried the truth to Baushpar.”

  “She reached Baushpar? She’s alive?”

  “You know she is. You were with her.”

  “No.” Gyalo shook his head. “I’ve only just arrived.”

  Râvar stared at him. “So you don’t know? What’s happened?”

  The room was breathlessly hot. Sweat prickled at Gyalo’s hairline, pooled under his arms. The transcendent clarity he had felt as he climbed the stairs was gone; the great design, whose edges he had seemed to grasp, had twitched back into the ordinary clutter of existence. Deep in his gut, he was aware of the first stir of dread. His scars had begun to sting.

  “No,” he said.

  “She warned them.” Râvar coughed again. “Most of them ran away. When I got here there were only ten of them left. Only ten, less than half. It was supposed to be all of them, all of them! Except her. The ones who stayed … they knew the truth about me, but they knelt to me … they called me by my name, my real name … they declared I was the Messenger. They knew the truth, they knew that I was false, but they believed in me even so.” That horrible smile curved his mouth. “Did you know they wanted to be punished? Yes, punished, for turning from news of rata’s rising when it was first brought to them. They never said anything about Refuge. That was their fault, too, but they never spoke of Refuge at all.”

  His eyes overflowed suddenly with tears. He showed no sign he was aware of them.

  “They said I was the Messenger they deserved. It’s time for us to end, they said. Let sleep come. Oh yes, they deserved me—but they weren’t supposed to know it! It was the lie they were meant to believe, the blasphemy. And then I would have told them who I was, and they would have known that they were damned, and then they were to die. Then I would have punished them. But punishment was what they wanted. So I couldn’t do it, do you see? I came away. I left them. They’re still waiting for me. They think they’ve done something wrong. They send messengers to beg my forgiveness, to implore me to return. Ardashir turns them all away. He says I’m in seclusion, meditating and purifying myself. Purifying myself!”

  He laughed, though the tears still came, sliding into the bolster, dripping from the bridge of his nose.

  “Do you pray to rata, Gyalo Amdo Samchen?”

  Gyalo was still trying to comprehend what Râvar had just told him. “Yes.”

  “Does the god answer?”

  “No.”

  “He doesn’t answer me either. I can’t even feel his anger. He is silent. Silent.”

  Râvar caught his breath. Noticing his tears at last, he put up his ruined hands to scrub them away and kept them there, hiding his face. His nails were ragged, rimmed with black. It came to Gyalo that in that unguarded moment he could act. With his shaping or with his hands, he could do what he had come to do. Yet it was confrontation he had anticipated. Retribution. Self-defense. Not reaching out, coldly and with deliberation, to snuff a life.

  In his hesitation, the chance was lost. Râvar lowered his hands. Something in his face had changed, sharpened.

  “How did you get here, if you didn’t come with the Daughter?” he said.

  Gyalo chose to answer literally. “Along the Great South Way.”

  “So you saw. You saw my works.”

  “Yes. I saw everything.”

  “Good. Good.” Râvar swiped the heel of his hand under his nose. “Are you here for the same reason, then? Still chasing after her?”

  Gyalo felt a shock of anger. It was welcome, like cold water. “Have you forgotten that you told me she was dead?”

  “No.” Râvar grinned his death’s-head grin. “It was a lie.”

  “I know. I knew it then.”

  “Well.” Râvar raised one bare shoulder in a shrug. “It doesn’t matter, because they aren’t here anymore. I got tired of them. I sent them away.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Would you like to hear what she said to me before I let her go? She said there is no god in this world. Did you know that? Did you know she has no faith?”

  “Yes,” Gyalo said through clenched teeth. “I know everything about her.”

  “That’s what you think. She has you fooled, the same way she fooled me, the same way she fooled everyone … Faithless bitch. If you find her, you can have her. Here’s something for you to remember, though—I had her before you did. Before you ever got her, she was mine.”

  His face contorted as he said it, spiteful as a child’s. And all Gyalo’s anger left him, collapsing into disgust—for Râvar, who at the end of so much atrocity took refuge in childish taunts and sniveling self-pity; for himself, who had floated into the squalid room on a cloud of exalted intent and discovered he was not, after all, a man who could intentionally kill another. A huge indignation rose in him, and an even greater sorrow.

  “All this,” he said, feeling the words deep in his chest. “All this destruction. All this misery. For what?”

  “For Refuge,” Râvar spat. “For my people.”

  “No.” Gyalo shook his head. “For you. For your anger. For your pain. That’s all vengeance ever is—a hole to pour pain into.”

  Their gazes held. Something seemed to happen in Râvar’s face, a kind of falling. For just a moment, everything in him was laid bare.

  “I should have killed you,” he whispered. “I should have.”

  With slow effort he rolled onto his back and lay there like one dead.

  Gyalo turned. He felt seared, as if he had been standing in a burning room. His hands were on fire.

  “Come,” he told Diasarta. “We’re leaving.”

  “The door’s still locked.”

  Without thought, Gyalo struck the door with his shaping will. All the metal that was part of it snapped out of existence: lock, tongue, hinges. The sound of it was shocking in the quiet. Unanchored, the door still stood in place. Gyalo put his foot against it and pushed, tipping it with a crash onto the floor of the gallery.

  He stepped across it, the winter air shocking his sweaty skin. Diasarta limped after him. Ardashir was nowhere to be seen; no one came to halt them. Behind them, the entrance to Râvar’s chamber gaped open, dark and silent.

  26

  Râvar

  THE ECHOES OF the crash the door had made, falling, had long died away. But the light framed in the opening, or rather its unremitting presence, produced in Râvar a similar response, a kind of recoil of all his senses. It had been days since he had seen, for any sustained period of time, any light but his own and the red glow of the brazier. Ardashir, entering periodically to bring and take away food, to empty the chamber pot and replenish the brazier’s charcoal, to make reports and sometimes to plead for instruction, did not count; even in the dark, he barely gleamed at all.

  Why had Ardashir not come to prop the door up again? Anyone might walk by and look into the room. Râvar supposed he could rise and do it himself. But like so much else, it hardly seemed to matter. There was no action he could conceive, however small, that did not founder in the certainty of its own futility. Simply to think of doing a thing was to rob himself of the will to do it.

  Faintly, from outside, he could hear the chanting of his faithful. Sometimes he was able to ignore
them, but more often the constant droning made him want to jump out of his skin. He had ordered Ardashir to quiet them, but Ardashir either had not obeyed or had not been able to make them obey. What portions of the First Disciple’s reports Râvar had actually attended to over the past days suggested that Ardashir had lost control of even that small splinter of the pilgrimage he had commanded when they reached Baushpar. The Awakened City is rioting in the streets, Beloved One. They are burning houses, looting temples. You must do something. Please, you must control them. Râvar turned his face away from these requests, as he turned his face away from food, from light, from offers of fresh linen. What did he care if Baushpar burned? What did he care if the Awakened City tore itself apart?

  He rolled onto his side, away from the door. The motion released the odor of his unwashed body. His filth repulsed him, yet in a savage way it also pleased him. Like the hot darkness, the sweat-stale sheets, the fetor of the chamber pot, it seemed appropriate. He thought of the shock that had spread across Gyalo Amdo Samchen’s face when his enemy first saw him. It had almost made him want to laugh. Almost.

  Why had he agreed to receive his enemy? He could not quite recall. Curiosity? Self-torment? The desire to torment the man he hated so? Why then had he allowed him to leave alive? Gyalo Amdo Samchen, standing not ten steps away, looking down with that still face of his, those dark judging eyes … How easy it would have been to turn the air around him to crystal and make him slowly suffocate. Or to call fire and burn him alive. But when it came to it, Gyalo Amdo Samchen’s life, or death, had not seemed to matter more than anything else. He had not killed the man when he should have killed him. Why kill him now?

  The hopelessness, the futility, washed through him like a poison tide. It was beyond anything in his experience, the sickness of spirit that had descended on him. Unlike his other griefs and despairs and disgusts, there was no anger in it. It was as if all his anger had been purged on the night the Brethren knelt to him, the night he let Axane and Parvâti go. Deep in the sickness’s grip, nothing else seemed real; it pinned him to his dirty sheets like a hand leaning on his chest and would not let him move. It cast him back to the beginning, lying among strangers he half believed were demons, terrified and injured and alone. He did not miss Axane, faithless traitorous Axane, but he missed Parvâti, an insistent hollow pain as if something in him had been sheared away. He longed to hold her, to set his hand above her heart, to forget everything but the rhythm of her breathing.

  Periodically, when the pressure receded a little or he found the strength to claw his thoughts above the flow, he saw that he could not continue this way. Somehow, he must get hold of himself, find the strength to get up and go on. Take control of the Awakened City again. Or abandon it, steal away in secret and lose himself in this hateful world. Something. Soon.

  Yet hour by hour, day by day, he huddled in this room and did not rise.

  Does it please you, rata? Do you like what you see?

  Even now, bitterly, he tested the silence. But poison waited there as well, and in recent days he had actually found himself wondering whether Axane could be correct. Was rata no longer on the earth? Had he abandoned the world he had made? But if rata were gone, what had been the vast warm presence, the deep embracing attention, that Râvar had known for so much of his life? What had been the certainly of love that had transfixed him in ceremony and meditation? A dream? A wish? Himself, mistaken for something greater? The emptiness he had experienced since Refuge’s destruction—the emptiness of a god whose face was turned away—was nothing compared to that. Even a hated god, a rejected god, a god who had rejected him, was less terrible than the idea of no god at all.

  Râvar heard the sound of footfalls. He rolled over again, feeling under his shoulder the hard lump of the Blood, which he had shoved beneath his bedding so he would not have to look at it. A man-shaped darkness took form within the jangling brightness of the doorway. Ardashir. The First Disciple advanced, becoming visible: the lumpish face, the rich clothes, the shadow-aura, weak as the last breath of a dying flame. Usually he carried something with him—water, a tray of food, charcoal for the brazier—but his bandaged hands were empty.

  By Râvar’s bedding he knelt, sitting back on his heels. Over the days of Râvar’s seclusion his iron self-control had been sorely tested; he was often unable to conceal his fear and his bewilderment. But now he turned on Râvar an expression as composed, as opaque, as stone.

  “You said nothing in the caverns,” he said, his voice equally calm. “But I could see you knew him.”

  What was he talking about?

  “These past days, you’ve spoken his name. You’ve cursed him, called him enemy. I wondered, how can a mortal man be enemy to a Messenger?”

  Outside, there was a burst of shouting from the pilgrims. He rolled his head on the bolster. “I told you to quiet them out there. Can’t you quiet them?”

  “I did not understand,” Ardashir said, and for a moment Râvar thought he meant the pilgrims. “But then I saw him in the Temple, unsought, unlooked-for, and it seemed the god’s will. So I did not kill him as you ordered me to do if ever I saw him again, but brought him to you, so you could punish him. I thought it might bring you back to us.”

  “Ardashir, leave me alone. I’m tired.”

  “You say that so often now.” Ardashir still spoke with utter calm. “So often you say it, when I try to speak.”

  Through the fog of Râvar’s self-absorption penetrated the fact that there was something very odd in Ardashir’s manner. Râvar attempted to bring his mind to bear, but it was difficult to concentrate.

  Ardashir leaned forward. Softly, he said: “What is Refuge?”

  Râvar felt the world go away for an instant. I imagined that. Didn’t I? He stared at the First Disciple. He realized, suddenly, what the oddness was: Since coming in, Ardashir had not used his title. Apart from the first days, when had that ever been the case? He felt a sluggish stirring of alarm.

  “I was listening,” Ardashir said. “In the next room. You would not let me care for you, you would not let me help you … but I heard you speaking sometimes, and I thought that if I listened, maybe I would discover what to do. So I made a hole in the wall. I went there today. I wanted to know why you hated him. What he had done. And I heard. I heard all you said.”

  “I was … testing him.” It was the first response that came to Râvar’s mind. He tried for the old authority, the old assurance with which he had made Ardashir and the rest of them accept impossible things. But he was out of practice. Even in his own ears, his voice sounded weak.

  “You said … the god … is silent.” Ardashir seemed to have difficulty enunciating the words. “You said … that you are—” He stopped, holding himself absolutely still. “False.”

  “I was testing him,” Râvar repeated. “With his own blasphemy. To see if he would renounce it.”

  “Then why did you not punish him? Why did you let him go?”

  “He was not worth my punishment.”

  “Why? Why was he not worth it? Why is any blasphemer not worth punishment?”

  “Ardashir, in time all will be—”

  “No!” It was a shout. “Don’t tell me it will become clear in time! I need it to be clear now! I have doubted.” He caught his breath in a sob. “rata forgive me. In Ninyâser, when you would not stop the looting—and later … I told myself it was my own weakness, my own failure, that it was not you I should question but myself. I prayed, I did penance. Look!” He wrenched at the bandages that wrapped his hands, exposing his palms, each a mass of open sores and crusted blood. “Look at what I did. But I could not … cut the doubt away. And these past days, since you lay down in this room … and now …” Tears were running freely down his cheeks. “Tell me I am base. Tell me I am blacker than the blackest ash. Tell me I have failed you. But tell me I am wrong. Tell me I am wrong!”

  Râvar saw that i
t had come at last, the thing he had feared so much in the very beginning: the moment when one of them, or all of them, would turn to him and see. It was his own fault. He had let himself descend too deep, slip too far away. He had stopped watching the edge on which he danced—had forgotten that there was an edge. He had not even noticed when he began to fall.

  Yet it was not too late. He could still reach out and save himself. He saw how it could be done. He would get up on his knees. He would take Ardashir’s hands, press his lips to the First Disciple’s insane and ugly wounds, as Ardashir had so often given reverence to his own scars. He would beg forgiveness for his inattention, his absence. He would take Ardashir in his arms and call him father—human father, to whom he owed his life, without whom he could not live. In this, which Ardashir most longed for, lay the key to his belief. Râvar would rise then. He would set the Blood around his neck. With Ardashir at his side he would go out to his faithful and never come into this awful room again.

  He felt the words upon his tongue, ready to be spoken: Ardashir, you are wrong. Yet even as he thought of saying them, other words came into his mind, whispered in a different voice.

  Why save it? Why save anything?

  It was like the moment in the Pavilion of the Sun, when the world turned upon itself and all his understandings were reversed. Except this time it was not horrifying, but revelatory. He could not help himself: He laughed. He saw the shock of it in Ardashir’s face.

  “Ardashir. You are not wrong.”

  Ardashir, who had challenged him, now opened his mouth in wordless denial. As he had imagined himself doing, Râvar pushed himself unsteadily to his knees, shaking back the filthy curtain of his hair. He reached toward the ugly man on whom he had come to depend so greatly, and took the wounded hands in his own. Outside, he was aware of the pilgrims’ chanting.