The Awakened City Read online

  He turned his face away, a dismissal as clear as words. I got to my feet without a word and returned to my tent. Reanu’s watchful attention reached out like hands to draw me home. Beside him, I paused and glanced back. The apostate sat in profile, his back straight, his loose hair stirring in the wind. For an instant I almost thought I saw his lifelight, the pearly aura he described to me.

  Of course it was only the moon, the moon and my own exhaustion. There’s much I am not certain of. But I’m absolutely sure of that.

  15

  Gyalo

  IT TOOK THEM ten days to cross the steppe, and another four to get to Darna. The Shaper administrator of the ratist monastery there was stunned by the unannounced arrival of a Daughter of the Brethren, exhausted and on foot, accompanied by so small an entourage; but he assembled the horses and supplies Sundit demanded with admirable dispatch. Ha-tsun, who had fallen sick, remained in the infirmary, with one of the Tapati to see her home once she recovered; the rest of the party rode hard for Ninyâser. They made good speed along the Great South Way, commandeering new mounts as they needed them. When the coin the Darna administrator had given them ran out, Sundit left notes of value sealed with her signet. If, as was occasionally apparent, those they encountered were not friendly to the church, they still did not dare refuse her.

  They reached Ninyâser in just over three weeks, a little over half the normal travel time. They entered the city as Gyalo had departed it more than five months earlier, by the King’s Gate—which was not really a gate at all, for Ninyâser was not a walled city, but a triumphal arch built by King Vandapâya IV to commemorate the twentieth year of his reign. Only a few months after its completion he had been deposed by the Caryaxists, who, aware perhaps of the irony, had allowed the Gate to stand, with its heroic reliefs of Vandapâya’s deeds and florid words of dedication inlaid in bronze on the entablature. Passing into its shadow, tipped hugely across the road by the late-afternoon sun, Gyalo felt as if he were dreaming, or waking from a dream; for a moment he was certain that if he turned aside at the Year-Canal and rode to his own house, Axane and Chokyi would be waiting there.

  Sundit’s tattoo was concealed by a wide-brimmed peasant hat, and the Tapati were swathed in cloaks and hoods. Only Drolma and Gyalo—the fugitive, the renegade—had no need to hide their faces. Traffic was heavy, and it was near sunset by the time they crossed the Canal by the Golden Bridge, which led directly to the ratist complex. The residence of the administrator was located at the compound’s rear, a graceful stucco building with a tiered roof of yellow tile. Reanu flung back his hood and dismounted, and beat on the door with the flat of his hand. The startled servant girl who answered went running for her master, who also came running, falling to his knees when he saw Sundit.

  “Great is rata,” he gasped. “Great is his Way.”

  “Go in light,” Sundit said wearily.

  The administrator scrambled to his feet. “Old One, I did not expect you for several weeks! The Son Vivaniya said you had been delayed.”

  “My Brother was here?” Sundit’s voice was suddenly sharp.

  “Not three days ago, Old One. He stayed the night and traveled on in haste.”

  “I see. Well, I will be remaining for longer than that. I have business in Ninyâser. I hope I may impose upon your hospitality.”

  “I am honored, Old One! Please, come in!”

  The next morning, Sundit composed a letter to Santaxma requesting audience on a matter of vital importance, sealed it with her signet, and gave it to Reanu to deliver to the King’s chamberlain. The Tapati captain departed bareheaded and uncloaked, in all the glorious complication of his tattoos. Like their arrival incognito, this was strategy: That Sundit would enter the city in secret attested to the urgency of her errand, but her use of Reanu as her messenger ensured that important people were aware both of her presence and of her approach to the King. “He thus cannot refuse to receive me,” she had told Gyalo, “as might be his first impulse, things being as they are. And though he will make me wait, for he won’t want it to seem I can command him, he cannot afford to delay too long.”

  She did not send word to her spirit-siblings, either of her presence in Ninyâser or her mission to the King. A summons to Baushpar would surely follow, and time was too short, either to debate her actions or refuse to debate them. “Sometimes,” she said wryly, “it’s easier to explain a thing after you have done it.”

  In the afternoon she sent for Gyalo. She was sitting on a granite bench in the administrator’s private garden, a small space carefully engineered to seem artless and natural, as if it had sprung into being unassisted by human craft, though to Gyalo’s Shaper senses its man-made artifice was glaringly apparent. One of the Tapati watched discreetly from a little distance. Sundit’s scalp was smoothly shaven and she was freshly dressed, but the rigors of the journey were apparent in the pallor of her face, the bruised skin beneath her eyes.

  “It’s done,” she said. “It took Reanu all the day and almost an entire purse. Once his face alone would have been enough.” She smiled a wry smile. “But the letter is delivered into the chamberlain’s hands.”

  “Good.”

  She patted the bench. “Keep me company.”

  It was a request, not a command—she had long ago stopped trying to command him. Gyalo sat, feeling the coolness of the stone through the coarse fabric of his trousers. He wore a servant’s castoffs, having refused the ratist garments he had been offered the night before.

  “Are you prepared?” Sundit asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Not for myself.”

  “You can still change your mind, you know. I’m still willing to tell him you are tethered.”

  “We’ve already settled this.” Weeks ago, in fact, before they left the steppe.

  “Yes, but I have been thinking about it since.”

  “No. There’s too great a risk he won’t believe you. It’s true I voluntarily retethered myself after the Burning Land, but I was still a vowed ratist then. What reason would I have to do it now? And if you present me as captured and forcibly retethered, a prisoner facing a lifetime of arrest, how plausible is it that I would have shared my knowledge with you? The whole of my credibility rests on the truth of who I am and the fact that I make no attempt to hide it. That means I must go before him as I am, a free Shaper with no intention of becoming otherwise.”

  “What if he thinks I have brought you to do him harm?”

  She had never raised that possibility before. It gave him pause. “Have things really come to such a pass?”

  She raised one shoulder in a not-quite shrug. “He’s a clever, watchful man, who might do such a thing himself if he had the opportunity.”

  “No. If that were your intent, why would you reveal me? You’d present me as an ordinary man, a disaffected citizen of the Awakened City perhaps. The truth testifies to the honesty of your intent as much as it does to mine.”

  “This is beyond perilous for you.”

  “It’s a little late to worry about that.” He did not try to disguise the sharpness of his voice. “Besides, I can protect myself.”

  “That I know.”

  Sundit watched the gazing pool before them, where the backs of carp flashed gold and black and orange in the water. The sky was overcast; in the pearly light her lapis aura seemed especially intense. Her sun tattoo was blood-dark on her forehead.

  “These arguments of yours are sensible enough,” she said. “But the reality, I think, is that you simply cannot bear to lie.”

  “I can lie when I have to.”

  “Can you? I’ve always wondered, in Baushpar, why you told the truth about your apostasy. You’d retethered yourself. Your companions would never have betrayed you. If you hadn’t confessed, we never would have known.”

  He was silent in surprise.

&n
bsp; “It could have been so different for you, Gyalo, if you had only lied.”

  “But you would have questioned. If I’d told you we survived the desert on luck and skill alone, a Shaper and his companions cast on the direst circumstances in the most hostile environment in Galea, would you have believed me? No. And those doubts would have brought you to the same point the truth did.”

  “Perhaps.” A dove winged down to rest on the far side of the gazing pool. Her eyes followed its descent. “Do you know the tyranny of a long life like mine?”

  “No.”

  “The inflexible straightness of time. It is a rod at whose end one always stands, unable to reach back.”

  She turned to look into his face. He had known her a little when he still served the Brethren. He knew her far better now—from the hardships of the journey, which had both tested and revealed her steadfast, stubborn character, and from the conversations in which she had nightly engaged him as they traveled. She told him of politics, of the rifts and conflicts between her Brothers and Sisters; he described the world of his Shaper senses, about which she possessed an inexhaustible curiosity. None of what he said to her was cathartic, as on the night he had condemned her and her spirit-siblings. None of what she shared with him was revelatory, as on the night she had admitted the Brethren’s long pattern of secret rule. Yet there was an honesty to these discussions, an engagement, such as he had not shared with anyone except Axane. Sundit had handed him the truth like a gift—a truth he had long suspected, but had never thought to know for certain. He had told her things about himself that he had never admitted aloud to another human being—that no other human being, perhaps, could fully comprehend. In that there was a kind of balance; and also, strangely, in their mutual rejection, he the apostate she condemned, she the ruler he repudiated. A peculiar bond had grown between them, less kind than friendship, more intimate than companionship.

  His view of her had altered in another way as well. His interrogation in Baushpar after he returned from the Burning Land had revealed the Brethren in all the rivalry and prejudice and pettiness and spite they normally concealed from their mortal servants—an absolute and utter humanness that had seemed to him, then, profoundly at odds with the wisdom and experience that should inform such ancient souls. It had been that, as much as the failure of faith that caused them to turn from the truth he gave them, that brought him to doubt their immortality. But in his daily association with Sundit, in his experience of her human will and human anger and human weakness and human courage, he found himself urged paradoxically toward belief. He had begun to think that what he had seen in Baushpar was not contradiction, but contrast—a disjunction that only threw the truth into sharper relief.

  It was not something he would ever have expected. It was not something he welcomed. But these days he was often conscious of the immortal Daughter behind the flesh-mask of the aging woman. She was there now, in Sundit’s level gaze—ancient, unfathomable, the long shadow of her dark deeds stretched out behind her, the many atrocities and betrayals of the Brethren— who had also, it could not be denied, ruled across the centuries with great wisdom.

  It was she, at last, who broke the gaze.

  He took the evening meal with the Tapati, then returned to his little chamber under the eaves. He had been allowed to occupy it alone; over the course of the journey Reanu and the others had more or less stopped keeping watch on him. The room’s owner, a maidservant, had been turned out to accommodate him, leaving behind one of her sashes and a small shrine to the Aspect Tane, Patron of crops and the moon. Tane was the Aspect his own long-dead mother had favored; for her sake, he had brought a little offering to place in Tane’s brass bowl, a perfect green plum selected from a platter of them in the kitchen.

  He went to lean on the sill of the single window, whose screen he had pushed back to admit the breeze. The days were still hot, but summer was nearly at an end, and the nights were growing cool. Outside in the deepening dusk, the windows of the monasteries and guesthouses glowed with lamp- and candlelight. The first stars spangled the vault of the sky.

  His mind returned to Sundit. He had told her the truth that afternoon: All his dread was bound to others, to Axane and Chokyi and Diasarta, and to a lesser extent, to the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands who would suffer if Râvar were not halted. For himself he was not afraid, or not very much.

  South of Darna, the party had come under bandit attack. A dozen horsemen had swept down from the crags that rose beyond the track, shouting like demons, sunlight flashing from their swords and knives. Apui and Lopalo and Omarau drew their own knives and prepared to stand; Reanu seized Sundit and bore her back along the track, shouting for Gyalo to follow. But Gyalo, gripped by an instinct that partook of no conscious intent, strode forward and struck the earth before the horsemen with his shaping will, breaking the ground and sending men and horses tumbling, then setting them to terrified flight with fusillades of lightning and volleys of thunder. As the last of them vanished over the crest of the hills from which they had come, he hurled a final sizzling bolt, sending a great explosion of grass and earth and stones high into the air.

  In the sudden silence he turned to the others. The Tapati stood frozen, their faces stark with shock. When he stepped toward them, Apui and Omarau actually fell back. Down the track, still clasped in Reanu’s arms, Sundit squinted at him, as if she were seeing something very bright or very far away.

  He had thought, in her fascination with his shaping, that she would speak of it. She never did. He had dismissed his first thought, that she was afraid; since then, he had wondered.

  It marked the beginning of a change in the Tapatis’ attitude toward him. He had awed them; more, he had defended them, and if that were not enough to make them trust him, it was at least enough to convince them he was neither mad nor malign. More important, it marked a shift within himself. For nearly three years he had held his shaping captive. If not for Râvar, it seemed quite possible he might never have returned to practice; and the practice to which he did return was small and joyless, crippled by his fear. In the hills he found the joy again. He drew his shaping like a bow, set it free with exquisite precision and control. He did not hesitate or hold back; in instinctive response he tapped the well of his power as he had never, in conscious practice, given himself leave to do. It was revelatory. It was ecstatic.

  Afterward, for the sake of the temptation he knew was there, he asked rata for forgiveness, if his actions or his delight in them were wrong. But in his heart he could not believe they were. The first time he had ever released his unfettered gift, dying of thirst in the Burning Land, he had experienced that same epiphanic recognition, the same sense of knowing himself entire. In his dread of misusing his power, he had forgotten. He had set his fear above the truth that above all should have guided him: that what lived in him was sacred. Surely that, too, was a sin.

  Whatever came of it, one thing was irrevocably changed: He could never fear physical risk again. He knew in his body, in his bones, what he had before known only with his intellect: No rope or chain could hold him. No prison could confine him. He could shatter the sword as it left the scabbard, unmake the spear as it flew from the hand.

  I am a man of power.

  The awareness of it filled him like an indrawn breath.

  When it was full dark he left the window, sat cross-legged on the floor, and meditated for the space of two thousand breaths. Then he stripped off his clothes and lay down on the bed. Closing his hand around Axane’s bracelet, he began his nightly devotions to her dreaming, whispering to her all that had passed that day. At last he stretched his free hand up through the transparent substance of the air, his pearl-lit palm cupping emptiness, imagining her Dream-fingers brushing his.

  “I love you.”

  The summons came at noon two days later, in the form of a courier with a mounted escort and several curtained palanquins borne by servants in
royal livery. Sundit dismissed all but one of the palanquins, which she occupied with Gyalo, while the Tapati came behind on foot, their tattoos unconcealed. The courier was dismayed, but did not dare to argue.

  They scythed through the busy streets, the horsemen riding ahead to part the traffic. Sundit had looped the curtains up so she could be seen; she wore new ratist garments of heavy silk and her simulacrum, normally hidden beneath her stole, lay on her breast, its glass replica of the Blood flashing fire when the light caught it. Ninyâser was a large city, used to processions; many people barely paused to note their passage. But others, recognizing the Tapati or Sundit’s tattoo or even her face, from one of the little portraits of the Sons and Daughters that were popular devotional items, knelt and made the sign of rata, or ran beside the palanquin begging blessings, which Sundit dispensed with regal grace.

  The towering brick walls that enclosed the grounds of the Hundred-Domed Palace were broken by seven massive gates, each named for a different gem. The procession entered through the Ruby Gate, which gave onto the private portion of the great estate. Its glades and paths and lawns were much like those in the public preserve, where Gyalo and Axane and Chokyi had wandered one sunny afternoon before Râvar reached out and tore their lives apart. Gyalo felt the memory touch him with fleeting sweetness as the exquisite prospects flowed past the palanquin’s open sides.

  They halted amid a spike-leaved stand of bamboo. Reanu came to offer Sundit his arm. Gyalo followed, adjusting the long tassels of his sash and feeling the pinch of badly fitted shoes. His garments, too, were new, bought for him by Sundit so the King would not be insulted by his appearance.

  “Old One.” The courier bowed. “The King waits.”

  Beyond the bamboo’s filigree shade, a slope led down to a moss-banked stream, sweeping in a graceful arc toward a copse of birches that breathed a light as pale as their blanched trunks. Embraced within the stream’s curve stood a circular wooden summerhouse, with gilded pillars and a conical roof of amethyst-glazed tile. A quarter company of the King’s Guard waited before it.