The Awakened City Read online

  “Can you not look into my face, Messenger, and see it there?”

  Râvar’s mind raced. “Of course. But you must name it. I ask again, what is your sin?”

  “To tell you, Messenger, I must first tell you of my life.”

  “Then do so.”

  Ardashir glanced down at his hands, at rest upon his knees. Spears of sun slanted around him, whirling with dust, their brilliance almost canceling the dim glimmer of his lifelight.

  “I was born in Arsace, in Isriya Province, on one of the great Caryaxist plantations. My father and mother were field-workers, as were their fathers and mothers before them …” He described his childhood, his adolescence, his ambition to be more than his parents were, his pursuit of power and his success in grasping it. He spoke of the ratist faith he had been raised to follow, in defiance of the official atheism of the Caryaxists—the secret congregation of ratist believers to which he and his family had belonged, the vows he had taken at the age of twenty so he could lead the truncated Communion ceremonies that were all that could be performed in the absence of ordained Shapers.

  “So you were a priest,” Râvar said.

  “As much of one as I could be, Messenger, in those evil times. If I’d been born in a different age, I would have vowed the Way. It may be arrogant to say, but I think that what I did, what men like me did, was perhaps a greater service—not just leading my congregation, not just honoring rata, but guarding faith during the time of oppression. Holding the flame of the god’s word against the darkness.” He paused, memory moving in his face. “It was the joy of my heart, that service. I strove to carry that joy into my secular life as well, to put the Five Foundations daily into practice, to stand like one of those Foundations within my community, a pillar and an example for the rest. In a well-lived life lies the seed of a thousand others, the Darxasa says, and I thought my life well lived indeed. The only change I imagined could overtake me was the Caryaxists’ fall and Arsace’s liberation.” He drew a breath, and said, without any change of inflection: “And then I murdered my wife.”

  Râvar felt everything in him go still. Of course he had known that Ardashir was an evil man, and not just because Ardashir had told him so. Axane had explained to him what Thuxra City was—a place created to hold the worst of the worst, men whom even the creatures of this dark realm could not tolerate free among them. But in Refuge’s more than seven decades of existence, there had been just one deliberate killing. It was an unspeakable, almost an inconceivable, crime.

  Ardashir was watching him, his face expressionless and yet alight, like a door closed on a burning room. “How,” Râvar made himself say, “did you come to do such a thing?”

  And Ardashir told him, efficiently, in the barest minimum of words. How he had wished for celibacy, like the priest he could never truly be, and had married only to satisfy convention. How he had persuaded his wife, a devout member of his congregation, to swear an oath to renounce the union of the body. How his wife grew dissatisfied, and began to beg him for a child. How he began to suspect that she was seeking elsewhere what he would not give her. How one morning he feigned departure, then returned to spy on her, tracking her to the worker’s hut where she had gone to keep her tryst. Rage had overwhelmed him when he saw her with her lover; the world had gone dark. When he came to himself, her neck was broken and her lover lay dying on the floor.

  He paused then, his eyes fixed on the packed-earth floor as if the images of his deed repeated themselves there. Râvar waited. This was the world into which he had come, he told himself: a world in which such people existed.

  “I always suspected I was capable of such a thing.” Feeling had come into Ardashir’s voice, a depth of self-disgust so profound it seemed to press against Râvar’s skin. “But I never knew for certain till that night. It wasn’t for love that I killed her. Even then I understood that. We’d been ugly with one another for a long time. If she’d asked me to divorce her, I might have agreed. Instead, she broke the oath we made together, our marriage vows. I had a position in the world, a duty. I had respect. She betrayed those things, all the things I built up out of nothing. She made a mockery of me—” He bit off the words, his mouth twisting. For a moment he sat silent, breathing deeply. “Still I should have borne my anger. I swore an oath as I sat by them, swore it to the god, though I knew I was damned beyond any hope of cleansing. I will never do such a thing again.”

  The whole cold strength of his will rang in his voice.

  “I don’t know how long I stayed there. When I left, I let the door stand open so they would be quickly found. I went to my office and put my files in order, and wrote out instructions for my successor. My wife’s blood was on me—there wasn’t any question who was responsible, once the authorities came.

  “I was sentenced to twenty years at labor in the mines of Thuxra. Eight years later the Caryaxists fell, and King Santaxma’s Exile Army came to occupy the prison. It was supposed to be emptied and torn down, but no one knew what to do with us real criminals once the political prisoners were freed, so the prison was left standing and we were kept working, defiling the Burning Land just as we had before, but for a different master. Yet I was glad they kept us. For I knew that you were soon to come and hoped I might see you when you did.”

  “You knew this?”

  “All the faithful knew it, Messenger. During the time of the Caryaxists, the people of Arsace sent up such a storm of prayer, such a tempest of entreaty! rata could not sleep through so much noise. He woke and saw our suffering, and in his wrath he wrought the Caryaxists’ destruction, using Santaxma as his instrument. Who later turned to blasphemy, curse his name.”

  “So you were actually expecting the Next Messenger,” Râvar said, marveling. “Expecting me. Even before I came.”

  “Yes.” Ardashir raised his face. “I’ve long known paradise was lost to me, that I would burn to nothing at the end of time. But I have hope now, the first hope in years. rata has placed me in your path—he has given me to you for your own—” He stopped, struggling for composure. “Perhaps he means to let me scour some of my darkness away. Or maybe he’s only given me to you because a man who has done what I’ve done need not fear to do anything else. All I know is that I am yours, that I serve you to death and beyond.” He looked down again at the littered floor. “I also know that I am not fit to offer more.”

  Râvar’s heart raced with exhilaration. He had intended only to flatter Ardashir’s desire for privilege and status, which was obvious not just in his self-bestowed title but in the jealous way he claimed custody of Râvar’s care. Yet the role he had offered Ardashir notched so precisely into the spaces of the First Disciple’s own character and need that it might have been constructed just for Ardashir, or Ardashir for it.

  A murderer, he thought. A blackened man, whom even the worst blasphemy could not further stain. A dangerous man, whose violence might one day turn upon the one he served. Yet Râvar’s shaping regained strength each day; soon he would have nothing to fear from any of these creatures. And what better guide, in a killing world, than a killer?

  “I do not have the power to absolve you of your crime,” he said. “Nor to promise that you will not suffer when the time of cleansing comes. But the service I offer you will lead you back to light, and something in you will survive to rise into brilliance of the new primal age. It is as you said: My father put you in my path. You will be my right hand and my guide. You’ll teach me, and you will teach the others also—everything I’ve said to you this day, everything I say in the days to come, you will tell them. That is my wish, Ardashir. It is my father’s wish. Will you accept it?”

  Ardashir’s rough features trembled. Tears overspilled his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Then I am satisfied.”

  “I cursed my life,” Ardashir said. “But now I bless it.” Before Râvar could pull away, he leaned forward and caught Râvar’s
hands, and pressed a kiss into each lacerated palm. “Messenger. Beloved of rata.” He smiled, for the first time Râvar could remember, showing gapped teeth. “I swear I will not fail you.”

  When he was gone Râvar clasped his hands, which still felt the pressure of that unexpected, unwelcome contact, and sank back into his bedding. The air was thick with heat. He was utterly exhausted. He thought of the words Ardashir, that blackened man, was spreading even now among the other blackened men who were his followers. Something harsh caught at his throat.

  See, rata. See how I defy you.

  As usual, there was only silence.

  Ardashir seemed never to have doubted that Râvar would recover, but in his weakness Râvar knew he had come close to dying. Three weeks after returning to consciousness he was still gaunt, and spent more time sleeping than awake. His skin, scarified by the sun, had peeled off in sheets, frightening him with the thought that it might never heal, and his palms and fingers were still painfully webbed with scabs. But the infection was gone, and he had put on a little flesh. More important, he was now strong enough to shape. He knew he could no longer put off the necessity of going before his followers.

  On the morning he had chosen, he ordered Ardashir to return to him at noon. Then he took out the razor and the comb he had requested some days earlier, shaped water to fill a bowl, and used it as a mirror to shave off his filthy, matted beard. It was a slow process, with his clumsy hands; in the past week he had begun to stretch them, tearing the scabs, but even so he feared they were healing twisted. With a rag he swabbed his body, then rubbed scented ointment from a little alabaster pot into the sore skin of his face. His followers regularly scavenged the wreckage of Thuxra’s custodians’ quarters, whose shocked and injured survivors were too preoccupied with their plight to care about strangers wandering among the ruins; they brought back many offerings for their Messenger: jewelry, clothing, small items such as the pot of ointment. Râvar sometimes looked at these things and thought about the people who had owned them, most or all of whom now lay buried under a mountain of fallen stone. He had done that. It was, and remained, a curiously abstract concept.

  He spent an interminable time teasing out the tangles of his hair, which was not only wretchedly dirty but knotted with sand, twigs, even pebbles. At last it lay smooth over his shoulders, sleeked with more ointment, falling past his waist. He unmade the noisome mess his grooming had produced, and from a pile of garments, neatly folded by Ardashir, selected a knee-length tunic and loose leg coverings of some sliding, lustrous fabric whose patterns his Shaper senses did not recognize. Last, carefully, he withdrew from beneath his bedding the product of several days of painstaking labor: the Blood, wrapped with silver wire he had untwisted from a necklace, padded on one side with Ardashir’s pouch, the whole strung on the pouch’s leather thong. He slipped it over his head. The huge crystal lay heavy on his chest, the fire at its heart pulsing at the bottom of his vision.

  He emptied the water in the bowl and shaped fresh, then bent over it, holding back his hair. Was he still good to look at? Throughout his life he had been matter-of-factly conscious of his beauty, and of others’ response to it—not just desire or envy, but the awe evoked by any truly rare thing. He had deliberately abused himself in the Burning Land to become the desert-ravaged Messenger rata’s Promise demanded; he had not thought to need his looks again. But it seemed to him now that to bind his followers to him he must use every tool at his disposal, including the perfection of his face and body, if any trace of that remained. The Blood’s light sparked on the water. Of himself he could see only planes and shadows, for the incorporeal fires of his lifelight could not be reflected. They were recognizably his features, if not exactly as he remembered them. Still, his face seemed the face of a stranger.

  He sat cross-legged on the ground, his back to the curtain that closed off his private space. When the rods of sun stood straight between floor and ceiling, he heard Ardashir enter. Gathering himself, he rose and turned. Ardashir stopped short. For an instant he stood motionless; then he sank to his knees.

  “Beloved One.” His eyes moved on Râvar’s face. “I should have known rata would make you beautiful.”

  “I will go out, Ardashir. To my followers.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “But … shall I not announce you? Prepare your way?”

  “I will go this moment, as I am.”

  Ardashir got to his feet. “Let me help you.”

  “I don’t need help. But stay by me.”

  Râvar stepped forward. It required an effort of will. I don’t need to fear these men, he told himself as Ardashir held the curtain for him. They are just men. I am a Shaper.

  The barracks was a long building, with wide entranceways at the midpoint of each lengthwise wall. The prisoners had improvised beds for themselves with materials scavenged from the desert and from Thuxra, setting them out in two long rows with a narrow aisle between, a makeshift arrangement that was surprisingly neat and tidy. A few men sat or lay on their pallets, their lifelights glinting amid the golden shafts of sun that pierced the gapped roof slabs. As Râvar emerged, those who faced the curtain fell still. Their transfixed attention communicated itself to the rest. By the time Râvar had taken ten steps they were all immobile, staring.

  One of the closest, a starved-looking man with graying hair and a garnet-colored lifelight, hitched himself to his knees, crossing his arms before his face. “Great is rata,” he said in a strangled voice. “Great is his Way.”

  The rest scrambled to follow his example. “Great is rata. Great is his Way,” they chorused raggedly.

  “Go in light,” Râvar said. His heart pounded like a hammer. “First faithful of this new age, I, rata’s Messenger, greet you.”

  “Beloved of rata,” said the man with the garnet lifelight.

  “Beloved One.” The whisper swept the gathering. The crowd was growing; men slipped through the entranceways to join the kneeling congregation, adding their colors to the rest. The patterns of the air broke and shimmered with their motion. Râvar saw the awe in their faces. A sudden excitement seized him.

  “Children of rata!” His voice rang strong and true. On impulse he called illusion, a white brilliance that burst around him like the sun on polished metal. As one, they gasped. “Heed me!”

  It was his first sermon. Some of it he had worked out in advance, but much of it came to him as he spoke. He told them how he had woken up to fire, as rata breathed the life-spark of divinity into his shell of flesh. He described his travels through the Burning Land. He spoke of Thuxra City’s destruction, the first of the two great acts described in rata’s Promise. He told them how he had felt their faith in the darkness that had fallen on him afterward, drawing him back to consciousness, to light. The words fell from his lips as if there were some flowing spring of them inside him. His followers were rapt. Even in Refuge, after he had become Principal Shaper, he had not been the focus of such intense attention. He could say anything to them, anything at all, and they would believe. He knew it with an instinct beyond question.

  “The time of cleansing nears, children.” At some point he had sunk to his knees, though he did not remember moving. “When rata with his holy fires will burn all living creatures clean of the ash that is their birth-burden, and of the darkness they have gathered in their lives. I know you dread those fires, blackened men that you are. But I have come to give you hope. In following me, you will gather light again. When you stand before rata, his judgment will be harsh—but that light will be in you, and it will survive. This I tell you—not one of you who believes in me will fail to rise into the brilliance of the new primal age. That is my promise, by the power of the Promise I have been sent among you to fulfill.”

  He was finished. But the hush that held the gathering did not acknowledge ending. Two hundred faces held him, two hundred pairs of eyes. Something more was nee
ded. Into his mind came an image of Ardashir, reaching for his hands.

  “See the marks of my service, the injury set by my father’s holy Blood into the flesh he made to clothe me.” He held out his hands, showing them the scabs, the distorted fingers. “This was done so you might always remember how I came to you. Now come to me and kiss these marks as a sign of your faith, and I will give you blessing.”

  For a moment no one moved. Then the man with the garnet lifelight pushed to his feet. He stepped forward and knelt again. Hesitantly, he bent toward Râvar’s proffered hands and touched his lips to them, first the right, then the left. He smelled of sweat and of the desert, dry and hot. His bony shoulders trembled.

  “Go in light, child of rata,” Râvar said softly. “May my father’s brightness burn in you, as it burns in me, as it burns in all living things. In rata’s name I give you blessing.”

  He set the tips of his fingers on the man’s forehead, calling illusion so that his touch seemed to leave a little point of radiance behind. The man’s eyes rolled; Râvar thought he might faint, but he mastered himself and rose. As he turned a whisper rolled through the gathering, soft invocations of the god’s name. The man stumbled to his pallet like someone dreaming.

  The rest flocked forward. Râvar gave them his hands to kiss, and blessed them, and set light upon their skins. Some cried out when he touched them; some wept. Many had to be helped to their feet. Râvar felt outside himself; he seemed to be acting from some great remove. At last they all sat in their places again. They were still waiting. But for what? He had used up all his invention and nearly all his strength. His mind was blank.

  And all at once, as if a cord had been cut, the earth seemed to roll over and everything became its opposite. He was aware of himself, one man before two hundred, clad in the thinnest veil of deception. He was aware of them, not worshipful but predatory, not awed but avid. Their belief was not the warm malleable thing he had thought, but as brittle as crystal. One wrong word, one mistaken act, and it would shatter. He was afraid to move, to breathe, lest he betray himself.