The Awakened City Page 13

  A slash of sunlight announced the caverns’ end. He emerged on a ledge above the steppe, into a whipping gale and the brilliant glare of noon. He had discovered this high place soon after the First Faithful claimed the cavern complex, driven to exploration by his horror of idle time. It reminded him a little of the Plains of Blessing, which had swept just as hugely out beneath the red cliffs of Refuge. The steppe grasses were short and tawny, not tall and silver, and the air did not carry the sharp smell of bitterbark. But if he half closed his eyes and stilled his mind, he could sometimes recapture a little of the feeling of home.

  In a fold of rock that gave some shelter from the wind, he folded the blanket into a pad and sat down. He raised his face to the midsummer sun, trying to lose himself in its warmth, in the bright clarity of the air. Instead, he found himself thinking about Ardashir’s admonition.

  The sign. What am I going to do about the ash-cursed sign?

  There was no sign, of course. It was something he had made up, to inspire his followers and lend glamour to their waiting. It would be easy enough, he had thought, to invent some portent when the time was right. But when would the time be right? His followers numbered well over a thousand. His missionaries had been spreading word, in Arsace and elsewhere, for more than a year. Was it enough? How could he know? The search for Axane had allowed him to postpone the question, for no decision could be made until she was found or his men returned empty-handed. But she had come; and he found himself no closer to an answer than he had ever been.

  I’ll think of something, he told himself. I always do.

  The wind gusted, harrying the clouds. He pushed his tangled hair back from his face. He had made the Awakened City, shaped it as much as any of the creations of his power; it was his possession, like the necklace that held the Blood, and though it was heavy, he was well capable of standing straight beneath its weight. Still, he was conscious sometimes not of leading but of being swept, as if he had jumped into a turbulent river. The jump he had chosen. But the journey, in many ways, chose itself.

  If all this had been described to me a year ago, would I have believed it?

  No. The Awakened City had not been his plan at all.

  He remembered the acts with which he had claimed his false title—a chain of disconnected images, as brilliant and static as the religious paintings on the gallery walls of Refuge’s lost Temple. Striding among the mines of Thuxra City, the Blood held before him on bleeding palms. The prisoner-workers, falling to the ground in awe, dropping their tools and stumbling after him. Standing before the walls of the prison, hurling against them the power that had shaken them apart—a power that in memory hardly seemed to be his own, but some vaster, stranger force summoned by his rage and grief out of the very substance of the world. He had named himself Next Messenger and unmade the prisoners’ chains. And then he had let go—of his body, of consciousness. After that, all was dark.

  He opened his eyes on fire. It seemed to him that he was pierced by shafts of flame. He bolted upright, gasping, certain he had died, and rata had wakened him to be judged. But then he realized he was in a room, made of stones so badly fitted that sunlight, solid with dust, lanced in everywhere through the chinks. Beside him knelt a barrel-chested man, his face half-hidden in a forest of black beard. Gently, the man pressed Râvar down again.

  “Rest, Messenger,” he murmured. His lifelight was the merest blue shimmer around his body.

  Râvar’s mind spun. Who was this man? Where was he? But the intensity of his panic had taken all his strength. He closed his eyes and sank again into blackness.

  When he woke again, it was to the consciousness of being lifted. Someone’s arm supported him; someone’s hands held a cup to his lips. He drank—water, warm and sulfurous—and was lowered again. His helper pulled away. It was the same man who had been by him before, the one with the dim lifelight.

  “What …” Râvar coughed, tried again. “What’s happened to me?”

  “You’ve been ill, Messenger,” the man said. “For near two weeks. We’ve brought you here to abide while you replenish yourself.”

  Messenger, Râvar thought. And then: Two weeks? There was a weight above his heart; he raised a curiously clumsy hand and touched something hard.

  “The Blood, Messenger,” the man said. “I wrapped it up and hung it around your neck. You were separated from it for no more than an hour.”

  Râvar felt the lightness of his body, the looseness of his limbs. He knew, without testing the knowledge, that he would not be able to summon any shaping. He was at this man’s mercy.

  “Where is this place?” His heart raced; it was difficult to breathe. “Who are you?”

  The man leaned close, like someone craning over the edge of a precipice. He smelled of sweat and dirty clothing. His eyes were silvery dark, the color of the sheen on a pounded nail head. “My name is Ardashir dar Adrax, Messenger. I am an evil man, blackened utterly with sin. But when you fell unconscious I was the first to reach your side, and when the Blood of rata slipped from your hands, I caught it. See how it scored my flesh.” He lifted his own hands, the palms wrapped in bandages. “The pain of these wounds is the greatest joy I’ve ever known, for in them I see rata’s mercy, which I believed was lost to me. I am your First Disciple. I lead the others, but I belong to you. Anything you desire, anything you require—only speak. Only whisper, and I will accomplish it.”

  The man’s gaze seemed to burn Râvar’s flesh. Râvar gasped and clenched his eyes closed.

  “Messenger.” The air moved. There was a sound of water. Something wet pressed against Râvar’s cheeks, his forehead. “Sleep now,” Ardashir whispered, as if to a child. “Rest.”

  Râvar made his breathing deep. Eventually he sensed that Ardashir had gone. A demon, he thought with shuddering horror. A demon laid his hands on me. He no longer really believed that the people of this realm were demons; but it was a new learning, and in his weakness it was less powerful than the old instincts, the teachings of his childhood. The remembered feel of Ardashir’s fingers made him want to crawl out of his skin.

  I’m alone. The knowledge pierced him, terrifying. He had been alone as he crossed the Burning Land, his people dead, his faith lost—but there had still been Axane. He thought it would be a relief to be rid of her. They had hated each other; toward the end, when he realized she was pregnant, he could hardly stand to look at her. But she had been the only remnant of his old life, the only person left in the world who remembered the things he remembered. Now, helpless in this alien place, he longed for her as he had never longed for anyone. Tears leaked from his eyes; he was too weak to sob. At last, mercifully, he slipped once more into sleep.

  In the time that followed, Ardashir cared for him like a baby, heedless of his own injuries. The older man showed neither reticence nor embarrassment, as if spooning food into Râvar’s mouth and emptying his slop basin and sponging his soiled body were honors no less divine than taking custody of the Blood of rata. Râvar loathed it, found it sordid and humiliating; but he had no choice, for even if he had been strong enough to care for himself, the bandages that wrapped his hands would not allow it. How could Ardashir do these disgusting human things and still believe him the divine Messenger? Daily he expected Ardashir to guess the truth, knowing that when it happened there was nothing he could do to defend himself. But the tenderness of Ardashir’s ministrations never faltered. The only emotion Râvar saw in those pounded-metal eyes was reverence.

  “We could not stay at the prison, Messenger, for you destroyed it utterly,” Ardashir told him when he asked about the aftermath of Thuxra. “Nor did we dare go over the Notch while you were so ill. So we brought you farther out into the desert, to the barracks where the mine workers lived during the days of the Caryaxists. The pressure wells still flow, and there’s abundant food not far away, for in your wisdom you did not destroy Thuxra’s gardens. We have been waiting for you to w
ake and tell us what to do.”

  “We,” Râvar repeated.

  “I and your followers. You’ve many of them, Messenger.”

  Râvar knew there were others here; he could hear them, talking and moving beyond the dusty cloth that had been cobbled into a curtain to close off the space where he lay. Occasionally one or another of them helped with food or water or new bedding, though Ardashir never allowed them to remain for long. Followers, he thought. Creatures of the outside world, waiting on his direction … He had not thought of followers. He had not really thought of very much at all, beyond Thuxra City’s destruction.

  “The decisions were mine, Messenger,” Ardashir said. “I hope they don’t displease you.”

  “No. Umm … How many of these … followers do I have?”

  “There were near five hundred prisoners working the mines when you came out of the Burning Land, Messenger. Many had no stomach for miracles—when you unmade their chains all they saw was the chance of freedom, and they took it. Others left to bring word of you to the kingdoms of Galea, as you bid them. But many wanted to remain at your side. I am … I was … something of a leader among them. I took charge of them and brought them here. Altogether, we are a little less than two hundred.”

  Two hundred! It was almost as many as had been left in Refuge, just before the Brethren’s army came.

  “They’re eager to see you, Messenger, impatient for the day you will come out to them again. But I’ve explained your need. They know they must wait till you are ready.”

  “Ready,” Râvar repeated.

  “Yes, replenished and in balance, as when you first came to us, before you worked the first of the acts of rata’s Promise and forced your human flesh to bear the weight of so much power.”

  Râvar felt a pressure in his chest. “My … human … flesh.”

  “Messenger, if I’ve presumed too much—” For the first time Ardashir seemed to falter. “It was only because they questioned. Only because some of them were frightened at your illness. How could he have done a miracle, they said, and yet be so frail? How can the Messenger feel pain, how can he sweat and bleed and suffer as we do? The truth seemed clear to me, and so I spoke it, that rata clothed his divine Messenger in a human body, made him god and man at once, a paradox, so that in enduring the frailties we do, in suffering as we do, he might more truly know and love and lead us, and we more truly know and love and follow him.” His face, what was visible of it above the beard, was full of apprehension. “Messenger, my pride has ever been my failing. If I’ve done wrong, it’s my offense—no one else’s. Punish me, but spare the others.”

  “Leave me.” It was all Râvar trusted himself to say. He rolled over, turning his back. A pause; then he felt Ardashir depart.

  Human and divine. Such a thing would never have occurred to him. According to the lore of Refuge, there was no humanity in the Next Messenger at all; he was a spark of rata’s own divinity, molded in the shape of a man so that those he was sent to lead would not fear him too much to follow. Râvar had never thought to present himself as other than a god, though he had had no clear idea how he could maintain such a pretense. But if the Messenger could be human, too …

  Conceiving his great act of blasphemy, he had given only hazy consideration to what would come after his claim of Messengerhood. For all his dark resolve, he had not been sure he would succeed. That his shaping gift was extraordinary he knew; but nothing he had ever done approached the magnitude of what he must achieve at Thuxra City. More to the point—would rata allow it? Why should he tolerate such blasphemy? All across the Burning Land, Râvar had waited to be struck down. Even as he stood before Thuxra’s walls, he had been prepared for the god’s fires to engulf him. It was hard to believe, afterward, that he was still alive and breathing.

  Nor did he understand the outside world. He knew its past; though the people of Refuge had believed it utterly destroyed, they had also believed it was their destiny to re-create it, and every child was taught its history. He knew something of its present, for Axane had told him a great deal as they traveled. But her stories were full of gaps, for there was also much she did not know, and he was aware that the little he had learned was far outweighed by his ignorance. It was impossible, therefore, to imagine in any but the vaguest terms what his course should be. Some sort of swift progress across Arsace … some strategy for tempting the populace to belief … the storming of Baushpar, where the Brethren would be brought to account … and then … what? He had no idea. He knew he might not even get so far: At some point the forces of the outside world would surely be arrayed against him. Or perhaps, tardily, the god would decide to make an end.

  With each day of his convalescence, he grew more aware of how his lack of strategy threatened him. He knew now why Ardashir could minister to him so intimately and still believe, why the others could accept him despite his weakness—but whatever faith they had in him would surely be forfeit soon if he could not find a way to take up his expected role. The thought made him cold with dread. It was not leadership that frightened him. He had led others all his life: From earliest childhood, he had been first among his friends and siblings and cousins, admired, imitated, beloved. But he had never led strangers. He had never led by deception. He had never imagined followers—people who might protect him (for even a Shaper could not guard against an arrow in the back, and of course the people of this world had that accursed drug, manita), but whom he would have to deceive, without fault or flaw, every moment he spent among them. What were the great deeds he had already accomplished, compared to that?

  I can’t do it, he thought, when Ardashir leaned over him with suffocating solicitude, or when he heard the coarse laughter of the men beyond the curtain, or when he woke gasping in the middle of the night, struggling to remember where he was. It’s too much. It’s too hard. But then came memories of the riverbank, of ruined Refuge. He feared the men beyond the curtain. He feared this alien world. He feared his own aloneness. But far more, he feared admitting to the ghosts that stalked his dreams: I did not try.

  In the end, that was what it came to. He had no choice.

  One thing he did not fear at all: the consequences of his blasphemy. He knew that after death he would suffer horribly in rata’s fires. He knew that nothing of him would survive. But he had rejected rata’s paradise. Better, a thousand times better, to be burned to ash at the end of time than to spend eternity under the light of the god he despised.

  “Ardashir,” he said one day, “do all the people of Galea believe as you do? About my … nature?”

  Ardashir set down the water he had brought and stepped back. As soon Râvar had been able to grip a bowl between his swollen palms and hitch himself across the floor, he had insisted on tending to himself; Ardashir knew now to keep his distance, though it was clear he would have preferred otherwise. He settled on his knees, back straight, his hands placed precisely on his thighs. Râvar was beginning to know that air of dignified self-containment.

  “They believe many things, Messenger. Some think you must be entirely a god. Others say you must be wholly mortal, like the First Messenger. But I’ve always thought that rata would do as he chose, and we human creatures could never say what that would be. When you revealed yourself, I followed the understanding of my heart. If I was wrong … Messenger, I know I am more fallible than other men. I’m ready for instruction.”

  Râvar shook his head. “You are correct.”

  Ardashir drew in his breath, let it out again. “Ah.”

  “I am … god and man at once, just as you said.” Râvar felt a cold prickling across his body. Even with all he had already done, it took an act of will to say the words aloud. “rata shaped me out of flesh and blood and bone, and breathed the fire of his own … spirit into me to give me life. I am more than the … the bearer of his word. I am a bridge … between the old age and the new. Between the human Age of Exile and the divin
ity of the primal age to come.” He drew a breath. “I’m grateful, Ardashir, for your understanding of these things, and for your care of my … human flesh during my sickness.”

  “rata set me in your path.” Ardashir wore the inward, revelatory expression of a man whose deepest certainties had been vindicated. “I knew it. I knew it.”

  “But I need more than your care now. rata, my … father, gave me this human body that I might know human suffering.” Râvar spread his wounded hands. “As you see. But I am new-made in my flesh. I know much of … divinity, but it has been left to me to discover the ways of humanness, just as, just as you humans do when you grow from childhood.” Part of him still stood apart, marveling. But he was beginning to discover a giddy thrill in spinning such a web of blasphemy, in the way Ardashir hung upon each word. “You’re a man of wisdom, that’s clear. I ask a boon of you, which will serve my … father as well as me. Be my guide. Help me learn how to be human.”

  All the joy went out of Ardashir’s face. Râvar realized, with a chill that snuffed his rash confidence like a pinched flame, that he had misstepped.

  “You want a better guide than me, Messenger. I told you when you woke that I’m an evil man. I’m not worthy to advise you.”

  Carefully, Râvar said: “What is your sin, Ardashir?”