The Awakened City

Chapter 1

He wore light--shimmering veils and coils of it, moving on him as he walked. It was not the natural radiance of his flesh but illusion, shaped from the substance of the air. Beneath it he was as he had come to them, naked but for a breechclout and the cloak of his long black hair. It was cold in the passage, the cold of rock, the cold of subterranean places, and his body was tense with chill. A heavy golden chain lay around his neck. From it, cased in gold, hung a great amber-colored crystal with a heart of flame.

The passage kinked, and he could hear the waiting crowd--a rushing sound that called to mind the hissing of the wind across the meadows of his lost home. The cavern’s entrance was a bright slash across the passage’s black. He increased his pace, launching himself into the illumination as if into water.

Below, on the cavern’s broken floor, his faithful massed more than a thousand strong. To his Shaper senses they were not just a packed throng of men and women, but a fractal play of color and light, stippled here and there with the ordinary flame of torches. Their noise surged as they caught sight of him. He strode to the lip of the overhang; by the time he reached its edge, they were roaring. Their adulation poured like sunlight into the dark void at his center; he spread his radiant arms, embracing it. He was warm now, warm as the heat-patterns rising from the torches. He threw his head back, and laughed.

“People!” he cried. The natural acoustics of the cavern sent his voice pealing out above the clamor. “People of the Promise!”

“Fulfiller of the Promise!” they shouted back. “He who opens the way!”

“People of the new age!”

“Guardian of the Interim, who speaks the word of the risen god!”

“People of Ârata!”

“Beloved of Ârata, who sets our feet upon the Waking Road!”

He was not certain when these phrases had become established. In the beginning, his calls and their responses had altered with each ceremony. But now the cadences were invariable, as if this were a true religious rite, and not the basest and most final blasphemy.

He gathered himself and leaped outward into nothingness, focusing his shaping will upon the air below his feet so that it grew slow and solid, allowing him to drift, rather than plunge, to the rock below. Unlike the illusory brilliance he wore, this was real shaping, and the flash and thunder of all true transformation accompanied it. Because of the strange proscriptions of this world, not one person here, apart from those same few who could see his lifelight, had ever witnessed unfettered shaping; to his followers, what he did was no human power but a miracle. He allowed his shimmering attire to billow outward as he fell, so they could glimpse his body. He knew that that he was beautiful to both men and women, and that for many, faith was most piercing when it was bound to carnal longing.

He alighted softly on the cavern’s floor. Before him, his followers were a scintillating wall--men and women and children, young and middle-aged and elderly, individuals and couples and even families. There were soldiers here, and blacksmiths, and seamstresses, and prostitutes; there were people who had given up their wealth to join him and people who had owned nothing to sacrifice. There were those who had passed all their lives in virtue and those who had followed the most violent of criminal pursuits. Yet in this place, in this moment, they were all alike, for they were all his creatures--stolen souls, every one of them, blackened past any point of cleansing with the blasphemy into which he had enticed them. The wonder and dread and desire he saw in their faces seemed to flow from a single heart.

He stepped toward them. His bodyguard, waiting at the precipice’s foot, fell in behind. The crowd parted like grass, those closest to him sinking to their knees. He walked slowly, for the mineral processes that had shaped this place made the footing treacherous, and though they believed him to be mortal flesh as well as divine fire, he did not want to do so human a thing as stumble. He held his hands before him so they could see the terrible scars the Blood of Ârata had inflicted when he brought it out of the Burning Land. They were allowed to touch his wounds if they dared, and many did, quick feather-brushes of finger on finger, palm on palm--and occasionally a brief warm shock on ankle or hip or shoulder, as those driven by greater courage or greater desire sought a more intimate contact. It had taken an act of will in the beginning to endure it, but over time it had become part of the larger thing he craved: their awe, their adoration, their longing, which for a little while filled up the void in him where those same passions once had lived.

“Messenger,” they sighed as he passed. “Beloved One. Most beautiful.”

He made a single circuit of the cavern. When he was done his bodyguard took up their posts again at the precipice’s foot, and he left them all behind, thickening the air before him to make a kind of invisible stairway he could climb. This was far more difficult than the trick he had performed to descend--beyond the capacity of most Shapers, in fact, even if they had been able to understand how to do such a thing--but to his huge gift it was nothing. On the overhang again, he turned to face the throng. They responded--not a roar this time, but a sigh, a mutter, like the purring of an enormous beast.

“People of the Promise,” he called.

“Beloved One,” they answered. “Messenger of the Promise.”

“You whose eyes have opened. You who have woken to the truth. You who in your faith have taken upon yourselves the sign of your love for me. You who are mine, as I am yours--wholly and entirely yours, in the body my father made for me and the soul he fashioned from his holy fires and the human heart he set beating in my chest.”

“Beloved One,” they chanted. Many held up their hands, palm out, so he might see the proof of their commitment. “Child of Ârata.”

“Look now upon the sign my father has given you, the sign of his rising, the sign of his will.”

With his hands he swept aside the wreathing brilliance at his breast, revealing the great crystal in its setting of gold. Not one part of what he said to them was true: not what he claimed to be, not what he urged them to believe, not what he pledged for the time to come. But the crystal was real. He had taken it himself from the Cavern of the Blood, where Ârata had slept the eons away and now slept no more. Its realness was the reason he could lie.

“See this drop of my father’s Blood, the sign he gave when he named me Messenger, so that his age-old promise might be fulfilled.” The exultation of the falsehood shook him, the completeness of the blasphemy. “It is my task to bear his Blood, and his will, into the new age that will follow on the closing of the Age of Exile. But the Blood does not belong to me. No--it is yours, all of you who gather here, for you are my father’s chosen people. The people of the promise, the people of the new age. It is you who will bring that age to birth. With me, you will open the way for his return.”

“Ârata,” they called. “Ârata who slept. Ârata who has risen. Ârata who will return.”

“Abide now with me. Abide in anticipation of the predestined moment of our emergence, and the sign that will reveal it. Abide in expectation of the fulfillment of our purpose, which we guard and nourish in this holy place of ours, this Awakened City. Abide in eagerness for the time to come, when we will march upon the world beyond these mountains and to its ignorance and corruption shout the truth we know--that Ârata has risen! That the time of cleansing approaches, when his holy fires will burn us clean and sweep us into the brilliance of the new primal age!”

“In faith we abide! In love we abide! In strength we abide!”

“In my name I give you blessing, and in my father’s name and in the name of the time to come. In my name, in my father’s name, in the name of the time to come, I bid you go in light!”

He flung up his glowing arms. A flash, a clap of thunder, and from the empty space above the crowd burst a rain of gold. They shouted and leaped for it, shoving one another, snatching at the air. He had early realized the importance of providing them with items they could keep and hold, in counterpoint to the intangibles of faith; he gave them something with every ceremony, jewels or crystals or nuggets of precious metal. Many had substantial hoards of these trinkets, which they treated as holy talismans. Where he had grown up, such conjurings had been tricks to pacify fretful children, but to these ignorant people they were sacred wonders.

Anything, he thought, looking down. I can say anything and they will believe. I can order anything and they will obey. The familiar dark thrill of it ran through him; he caught his breath. With his shaping he commanded the elements, the very structure of reality. With his voice and his person, he commanded souls. Were those not the powers of a god?

He left them, passing once more into the pitchy darkness of the passage. He let go the illusion that clothed him, the gaudy trappings of the role he played, and strode through the mountain’s black heart with only the light of his own life to guide him, and, on his chest, the shuddering fire of Ârata’s Blood.

In his private domain, a succession of cave-rooms that he had enlarged and changed as the whim took him, he sought a particular chamber with a circular well punched into its floor. He had shaped it full of water before the ceremony; now he caused the water’s patterns to dance with heat, so that steam billowed toward the ceiling. He removed the chain that held the Blood and laid it carefully on the floor. In spite of everything, he could not break himself of the habit of reverence.

He unwound his breechclout and slid into the warmth, sighing. He lay with his eyes closed, his black hair coiling round him like a shadow-memory of the light he had worn. The last of the ceremony’s exaltation slipped away, and the residue of his followers, all the hundreds of little touches they had pressed into his skin, leaving him clean, leaving him empty. The hush of his quarters settled around him--the quiet of the deep spaces inside the rock, and, beneath it, a far greater silence. He could speak or cough or roil the water, and the mountain’s quiet would be banished. The other silence was beyond his power to break. The shouting of his followers filled it, but only briefly.

He remained in the water until the balance began to tip, the relief of his aloneness eclipsed by the discomfort of it. He hated being alone. In some ways it was the most difficult part of his charade, to be pulled always between his contempt for the creatures who surrounded him, whose adulation he had grown to crave but could not endure for long, and his horror of solitude. He climbed from his bath and walked dripping to his bedchamber, where he pulled on his clothes, clumsy with his ruined hands. He made as much noise as possible, but still the silence pressed on him.

But it will be different soon, he told himself. Very soon. An end to loneliness. It was a hope, not a certainty. In the old days he would have prayed. These days he had only himself to rely on, and knew it had always been so, even when he believed.

He tightened his belt and stamped into his boots, which were nomad-made, their toes shod in silver. He left his quarters to walk the dark inner spaces of the mountain and fill them with the light and tumult of his power, shattering the silence until he grew tired enough to sleep.

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