The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  “What you heard is the truth. I am no Messenger, just a Shaper, an unbound Shaper like my enemy Gyalo Amdo Samchen—apostate, the people of your world would say. I was born of human parents in a place called Refuge—a far place unknown to you, but a human place. I’ve come among you to speak blasphemy. To deceive you with false witness. To blacken your souls and my own. My name, my real name, is Râvar.”

  “No,” Ardashir said out of his horrified, denying face. He was trembling; Râvar felt it through their joined grip. “I’ve seen … the wonders you have done. I’ve seen your miracles.”

  “Shaping. Only shaping. How should you recognize it, who have spent your life in a land where there were no Shapers?”

  “This is … a test. You are … testing me.”

  “No, Ardashir!” It was a mad sort of joy, to speak the truth at last. “There are no tests. There have never been any tests. I used you. I needed a man to help me build my blasphemy. I chose you. It wasn’t hard—I used your faith, your desire to believe, your guilt about your sin. I didn’t even really have to work at it. By the time I woke up after Thuxra, you’d already constructed half the myth yourself.”

  Ardashir jerked his hands free. His entire body seemed to lean away. His gaze had grown blind. “You used me—to blaspheme—”

  “Think of all the absurd things I told you. The time of Interim. You were a priest—when did you ever hear of such a doctrine? The new Way of rata. Where is it written that the Next Messenger will make the Way anew? Why should the Next Messenger need to build an army? Why should he be as ignorant of the world as I was—would not rata prepare his emissary better? Why should he kidnap a woman and her child and keep them hidden? I know how much you’ve wondered about the woman and her child, Ardashir—well, here is the truth. The child is mine. I got it on her by rape, in the time before I came to you. Later she became his wife, my enemy’s wife, Gyalo Amdo Samchen’s wife. I wanted her back, her and the child. So I took them.”

  “No.” The pilgrims’ singing seemed to be rising louder—had they broken past the gates? Around the walls, darkness stirred like smoke. “No. It is too base.”

  “You wanted answers. Now you have them.”

  “I gave you … everything.” The words grated like stone on stone. “I built … a City for you. You have made … a mockery … of my work. A mockery … of me.”

  Râvar laughed again. “I have made a mockery of your world!”

  “Why?” Ardashir’s whole body shook. His hands, trailing bandages, clutched the air. “Why?”

  The chanting was deafening now. Or perhaps it was only the drumming of Râvar’s blood. “For vengeance. For my people, whom your people murdered. For myself. Because I hate your world. Because I hate you.”

  Ardashir gave a sobbing shout and sprang. His weight bore Râvar back into the tangled bedding. His hands closed around Râvar’s throat. His features were contorted into a mask of rage and grief, his eyes once again streaming tears; he was still shouting, a long wailing cry that rose above the pilgrims’ singing. Was this what Ardashir’s wife had seen before she died? Râvar scrabbled with his crippled hands at the First Disciple’s wrists; he reached for his shaping will, to turn the air between them to crystal, to choke Ardashir into unconsciousness as Ardashir was choking him.

  And the world turned upon itself again, and the voice spoke once more inside his mind, saying: Why?

  It seemed the greatest understanding he had ever known. He yielded to it, even as his body struggled involuntarily for survival. Ardashir’s face was inches from his own, but it was fading, darkness gathering before his eyes.

  rata!

  A silent cry, no more willed or wanted than the battle for breath. A cry no different from the thousand others he had made—but this time, like a miracle, there was answer. Incandescent presence exploded out of the heart of the world, roaring into all the long-empty spaces, stretching them past wanting, past bearing. Râvar’s power, which was of the same substance, leaped to meet it. Light seemed to burst inside his chest. Far away, there was a sound of thunder.

  Râvar felt, at last, the touch of flame.

  27

  Gyalo

  GYALO CAME GASPING out of nightmare. For a moment dream and waking merged, suspending him between two worlds: the cold winter darkness of Baushpar, the heat-shimmering brilliance of the Burning Land. He seemed to see the Awakened City, marching out into the desert—more of them and still more, the whole population of Arsace perhaps, the darkness of damnation breathing up from them like smoke, their passage burying the red soil in soot and ash. Râvar led them, astride a steed as huge and terrible as a thundercloud; Axane rode behind him, and he held Chokyi in his arms. Axane looked back as they went, crying Gyalo’s name. Her voice was the last piece of the dream to fade. So distinctly did Gyalo seem to hear her that for an instant he was certain she stood outside his door, come to Baushpar in search of him.

  He sat up and drew up his knees, resting his elbows on them and his forehead on his hands, and breathed deeply, allowing his pulse to slow. She isn’t here. She’s safe. He held the thought like an amulet, willing himself to believe it. They’re both safe.

  Nearby, Diasarta snored lightly in his sleep. They were camped in an abandoned villa along the same wide street as the mansion Râvar had commandeered, closer to the city’s edge but near enough to hear the monotonous singing of the pilgrims. The house’s owners, departing in haste, had left nearly everything behind; the companions could have had their pick of several comfortable bedchambers but had chosen instead a small room on the ground floor, whose door they were able to bar. A pair of braziers, and their own auras, shed a little light. Beneath the tang of smoke that tainted everything in Baushpar, the air smelled of mold.

  The events of the day returned to Gyalo, an acid wash of memory. He had gone to his enemy, full of purpose and intent. He had listened to his enemy’s confession, condemned his enemy’s deeds—and then he had departed, leaving his enemy living. He thought of Axane, scoffing when he told her he meant to end Râvar’s life; she had understood him better than he, apparently, understood himself. Yet Râvar had seemed halfway into death already—sick in his soul, as Ardashir had said. But if it were possible that he would cower in his fetid den as the Awakened City tore Baushpar apart, as it tore itself apart and scattered to the winds, it was also possible that he would recall himself, that he would rise to pull his unraveling empire back together. As long as he lived, so did the danger.

  I have to return.

  The understanding woke no fear, only a profound weariness. Gyalo thought of the transcendent recognition he had seemed to achieve as he climbed the stairs to Râvar’s room—the glimpse of vast design, the intimation of a great weaving through which his own life stitched a single, integral thread. The shock of what he had seen and heard inside the room had toppled him from that high perspective, back into his ordinary groundling view. Perhaps that was why he had failed: He had lost the necessary vision. Somehow, he must find his way back to it again.

  He rubbed his eyes, sore from smoke and too little sleep. If he had not let Râvar speak, he would not have learned the truth of Râvar’s confrontation with the Brethren. How extraordinary, how unfathomably strange that the belief of those who remained should turn on Râvar’s true self, that they should willingly embrace the very thing that had been meant to drive them to despair. Who had they been, the ones who begged for retribution, who said Let sleep come? Which of them had rejected punishment and fled with Sundit?

  When Axane first told him of Râvar’s plan of vengeance, Gyalo had wondered whether, as he had been rata’s test of the Brethren, Râvar might be rata’s reckoning: a living judgment brought upon them for their cowardice. Later he had dismissed that notion—for Râvar’s anger was indiscriminate, and if the Brethren deserved punishment, Arsace and its people did not. But in the strangeness of the Brethren’s conversion, Gyalo’s thought
s returned to that original path. Judgment. Retribution. All of Râvar’s deeds had been in service of his own personal vengeance: the souls he tricked into following him, the dark acts to which he incited them, his own annihilating feats of power. Yet within that ugliness lay deeds of another nature. Thuxra City, built by a godless regime and exploited by a conscienceless one, a blight and a defilement upon the sacred body of the Burning Land—leveled. Santaxma, the ruthless King whose consummate gamesmanship had trapped the weak-willed Brethren into supporting him in blasphemy—executed. Were those not reckonings, reckonings rata himself might have decreed? Two great destructions: Thuxra at the birth of Râvar’s deception, Santaxma at the midpoint of Râvar’s progress through Arsace. Baushpar, at its conclusion, would have been a third.

  A beginning, a middle … and an end.

  It was as if the earth had shifted. Gyalo felt the whole of his understanding turn, all his thoughts falling in an instant into new alignment. Three huge obliterations. Two already accomplished, the third yet undone. That third, not simply of the holy city that was the seat of the Brethren’s authority, the heart of the church, but of the Brethren themselves and the institution of their rule. He thought of the insights he had gained since his escape from Faal—the understandings that had distanced him not from faith but from doctrine, not from belief but from the apparatus of its expression. He thought of how, following Râvar along the Great South Way, he had come at last to understand how utterly he had left the church behind. He thought of himself that afternoon, standing amid the dim magnificence of the First Temple of rata and comparing it to an outworn garment. rata and his Way are not the same, he had told Axane just a few nights ago: eight words, the full harvest of his journey toward emancipation. Or so he had believed then. Suddenly, he saw that there was more. If rata were no longer contained within the faith that bore his name … if the church no longer held the key to truth … if in fact it had become the opposite of truth … should it not indeed be swept aside?

  Was that what it meant to open the way?

  Gyalo sat transfixed, his eyes turned blindly on the dark. Râvar, promulgating his blasphemy of Messengerhood, even as he spread true word of rata’s rising. Râvar, preaching invented doctrines to beguile his followers into heresy—yet was there not indeed a time of Interim, a span of years between the god’s rising and his return that was neither the old age nor the new? Should not there be a new faith for that time, a Way of rata awake? Râvar, dark and angry, a Messenger consciously false to himself—but to rata? Could the god not choose whomever he wished to bear his word, to bring his judgment? Had he not, twelve hundred years ago, chosen Marduspida, a man of no outstanding holiness, so burdened with the universal flaws of human nature that six times he had refused rata’s summoning dream?

  And if Marduspida had refused a seventh time? Would rata have looked elsewhere for his Messenger?

  I refused. Or at least, refused to choose.

  Gyalo clutched his head in both his burning hands. He felt a drowning horror. From the start he had been certain that Râvar was the Brethren’s consequence, their own failure turned back against them. But what if Râvar were his failure? His consequence?

  From outside, a sudden burst of shouting drowned the pilgrims’ chanting. It did not die down, but drew out, rising louder. Diasarta stirred, sat up.

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “I don’t know.” Gripped by an inexplicable urgency, Gyalo reached for his boots. “I’m going to go look.”

  They left the house. The night air smote them as they stepped outside, raw and smoky. The rain had stopped, but the sky was overcast, utterly black. The shouting continued; it sounded as if some conflict had broken out. In the direction of the old city, the clouds glowed red.

  “Big fire somewhere,” Diasarta said.

  Gyalo could not have put into words what he suspected. He began to run, down through the villa’s parklike grounds, leaving Diasarta behind. The street was a void of darkness bordered on either side by the spectral luster of trees; he raced to the left, toward Râvar’s mansion. The shouting intensified. He thought he could hear screaming. He rounded a curve; the crowd of pilgrims came in view, a struggling mass of multicolored brilliance blocking the entire width of the street. The wind gusted, carrying the harsh smell of smoke.

  It was Râvar’s house that burned. Gyalo could see the flames, leaping toward the sky. The crowd surged against the closed gates, trying to break them down. Pilgrims climbed the walls, shredding clothes and flesh on the sharp ridge of tile meant to discourage such incursion, flinging themselves down on the other side.

  A groan, a great noise of splintering. The gates gave way. The pilgrims battled through the opening, shouting, shoving, trampling. Gyalo joined them, fighting to keep his feet. Beyond the bottleneck of the gates the crush expanded; he ran with the others, heedless of lawns and plantings and carefully raked gravel pathways, stumbling, falling, getting up again. Ahead, the house burned with incredible ferocity, the roof already part-collapsed, every window a torch, the door a dragon’s mouth. The trees around it were aflame. The roar of combustion drowned even the pilgrims’ screams. Smoke hid the sky.

  Still some distance from the conflagration, the faithful were halted by a terrific wall of heat. Gyalo, shoving savagely between the packed bodies, felt it on his face like a branding iron; the air, to his Shaper sight, heaved and bubbled like water coming to the boil. As he neared the front he heard a shriek: “No! No! I will follow!” A woman tore from the hands of the man trying to restrain her and hurled herself toward the fire, her hair and clothes blown out behind her by its deadly wind. Up the burning steps she sprinted, through the incandescent door. For an instant she could still be seen, black on red. Then the flames roared up, and she was gone.

  The crowd howled. Gyalo shouted with them, horrified. There was another runner, a man, half falling on the steps, picking himself up, diving into the fire’s embrace. And then another, and another, a sudden insane flood of them, dashing and stumbling and crawling in pursuit of their Messenger, who had gathered them and led them and still, no matter where he chose to go, must be followed. Something struck Gyalo a blow between his shoulder blades, knocking him to his knees. Another pilgrim thrust past. Gyalo flung himself after the man, grabbing him around the legs, bearing him to the ground. The pilgrim kicked and fought, his face crazed in the red light.

  “Let me go!” he screamed. “I will go with him!”

  Inside the house something huge crashed down. Sheets of flame erupted from every opening. With an enormous, grinding groan, the rest of the roof collapsed, sending fire towering into the night. The crowd stumbled back from the gale of heat. Gyalo struck the pilgrim away from him and staggered to his feet. He felt his skin crisping, his breath boiling in his chest. Flinging out his arms for balance, he hurled forth his shaping will, seizing the patterns of the inferno, blasting them apart. There was a sound like a giant’s footstep. The ground shook. The flames flashed white. Then they were gone—all of them, in an instant.

  Silence. Shouting still rose from the street, and there was a crackle of combustion from the burning trees. But in the stunned stillness of the crowd, the hush seemed complete, a clear dome of quiet clapped down over just this place.

  Gyalo turned, panting. The light of his power had seared his vision. Phantom shadows swam before his eyes, dimming the pilgrims’ brilliance. They knelt or stood or clutched one another in attitudes of shock, staring toward the place where a holocaust had been and now was not. None looked at him. Why should they? They had witnessed Râvar’s “miracles,” but they knew nothing of free shaping. There was no reason they should understand what they had seen. No reason they should notice him.

  “No.”

  One person was looking at him: the pilgrim he had tried to stop. The man had risen to his knees, his face a mask of grief. “No!” he cried again, and launched himself at Gyalo, who by seizing
him had deprived him of his chance for immolation. There was no strength behind the attack; Gyalo easily thrust him off. The man fell again, heavily, curling in on himself, weeping.

  Gyalo felt a sudden rage rip through him.

  “Go home!” he yelled at the pilgrims, his smoke-roughened voice cracking. “Your Messenger is gone. Your pilgrimage is done.”

  Some had already turned toward him, their attention drawn by the scuffle. Now more did, their ravaged faces uncomprehending.

  “The Messenger! Where is the Messenger?”

  “Dead!” A woman’s voice. “He is dead!”

  “The Messenger is dead!”

  “rata help us! rata help us!”

  “Your Messenger is gone!” Gyalo shouted. At his feet, the pilgrim sobbed. The burning trees lit up the night like torches. “You’ve followed him as far as he can be followed. Now rata has taken him back. His work is finished, and so is yours. Go home. Go back to Ninyâser, go back to Sardis and Darna and Abaxtra. Go back to your families, to your farms and your trades. Take up your lives again.”

  “But what will we do until rata returns?”

  “How will we wait?”

  “How will we live?”

  “Live in peace. Tell others to do the same. Follow the Foundations. Pray. rata is awake. He hears you now.”

  “Who are you?” Gyalo could see the speaker, a young man with wild black hair and a pale lifelight.

  “No one. A witness.”

  They were all focused on him now, those at the front pushing toward him, those at the back jostling for a better view. He saw that if he remained they would claim him—for they were herd animals, and in their desperation would follow anyone who seemed to offer leadership. Not allowing himself time for thought, he ran at them, diving among them as the runners had dived into the flames. They reached after him, calling, but he did not pause, wrenching free of the hands that tried to hold him. Soon he was past those who had seen and heard him, anonymous again. Their rising lamentations filled his ears; women tore their hair, men rent their clothing. Every face was distorted with terror and with grief.