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The Awakened City

Three
Gyalo


“How much for a letter, scribe?”

Gyalo looked up from the box into which he was packing his writing materials. “A half karshana for each page for black ink on rough paper,” he said, shading his eyes against the late-afternoon sun and the questioner’s own lifelight. “A three-quarter if you want a fair copy. If you want colored ink or better paper, I’ve a stock for you to look at and we can agree on the extra price. For another half, I can see it goes into the temple’s mail pouch.”

“Does that mean it’ll get to Yashri Province?”

“Yes. Or anywhere else in Galea.”

“You’re pricier than the others.”

Gyalo shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”

The young man stood a moment, irresolute. “All right,” he said abruptly, and sat down on the stool Gyalo kept for customers, fumbling with the wallet on his belt. “There’s four quarters.” He held out the coins. “One page. No copy. And I want it delivered.”

Gyalo put the coins away, then took what he needed from the box and prepared to write. “Just speak as you normally would,” he said, when the boy remained silent.

“I’m thinking.” The boy shifted on the stool. His coppery lifelight sprang energetically out around him, shading to yellow at its edges. A grubby bandage wrapped his left palm; he cradled that hand in the other, as if it pained him. “All right. Greetings to Mother and Ansi and Soris and--No, wait. Just write...just write, Greetings to my family.”

Gyalo made the change.

“I’m going away on pilgrimage--wait, don’t say that. Just, I’m going away for a while. Ummm...I don’t know when I can--when I will be back. But I’ll be in good company, so you’re not to worry. I’ll send word when I can. Read that back, scribe.”

Gyalo did.

“Ummm...This letter is for family, so when you’ve read it you must burn it. I’m not supposed--” He paused. “We aren’t allowed--”

Again he stopped. Gyalo waited, pen poised above the paper. Faintly, from beyond the temple walls, the clamor of the city’s streets rose up--the great voice of Ninyâser, which even at midnight was never still. Here in the forecourt it was quiet, with only the murmuring of the scribes and their customers, and the whisper-sound of devotee-priests and worshipers passing to and fro in cloth temple shoes, to stir the air.

The boy looked up. His face was set. “I’ve changed my mind. Tear it up.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s my letter, scribe. Tear it up!”

Gyalo set his pen in its rest and tore the paper in half and in half again. The boy held out his uninjured hand.

“Give me the pieces.”

Gyalo handed them over. “I want my money back,” the boy said, stuffing the scraps into his wallet. “You wrote, so I figure you earned a quarter, but it wasn’t a whole letter and now there’s nothing to deliver. So I want a quarter and a half back.”

“A page is a page, no matter how many lines are written on it.” Gyalo opened his own wallet. “I’ll give you back the half for delivery, but that’s all.”

The boy scowled, then snatched the coin. “You can’t tell anyone I was here.”

“Who would I tell?”

“It doesn’t matter. You have to promise.” The belligerence was gone. “Please, scribe. We aren’t supposed to tell our families. I’ll get in trouble if anyone finds out.”

Gyalo shrugged. “Very well.” Then, when the boy did not move: “Was there anything else?”

A sly expression had come across the boy’s face. “Aren’t you curious? About where I’m going?”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to say.” Gyalo tapped the ink from his pen back into the inkpot, and cleaned the nib on a rag.

“Only to families and friends and suchlike, if they’re not coming with us. Our oath’s like a knife, it cuts off our old lives, cuts ’em at the root. We can’t walk free on the path of faith if we drag our loves and hates and desires after us.” He was obviously reciting something that had been told to him. “But we can pass the word to strangers if they want to hear.”

Gyalo put the cleaned pen with its fellows in the box, corked the inkpot, and stowed it in its slot. The nature of his business had changed over the past year; he had regular copying commissions now and could often work in comfort at home. But the small documents, the letters and wills and bills of sale, were still the foundation of his income, and at least three days a week he wheeled his cart to the temple of Inriku, Patron of learning and the arts, and took his place among the scribes and notaries who gathered daily under the portico of its forecourt. The people who used his services turned to the written word only in extremity; there was a tale, sometimes a terrible one, behind every document he produced, and they were often all too willing to confide it. It had been his duty to listen, when he was sworn to the Way of Ârata. But he was no longer a vowed Âratist.

“Well, I don’t want to hear,” he said, shutting the box and starting to close up his portable writing desk. “No offense.”

“Not even if I told you”--the boy’s voice dropped--“that I was going to meet the Next Messenger?”

The light of late afternoon seemed suddenly to dim. “The Next Messenger?”

“Yes!” The boy leaned eagerly forward. “Because he’s come to open the way for Ârata’s return, and he’s calling all the faithful to his side!”

Gyalo drew a long breath. He latched the lid of his desk and folded his hands atop it, and said, quietly: “Tell me more.”

A smile of triumph broke across the boy’s face. “I’ll tell you the whole story! I’m apprenticed to--well, never mind. A couple of days ago one of the other apprentices was talking about a conjurer he’d heard of. Some of us decided to go, but it turned out it wasn’t a conjurer at all, but a holy man. The others got angry and left, but I figured since I’d come all that way I might as well listen for a while. I’ve heard holy men before, who hasn’t? But this one--he had a way of talking. It made you listen. It made you believe. He said that Ârata had woken, and the Next Messenger had come. He said the fall of Thuxra City was the act of destruction that marks his coming, like it says in Ârata’s Promise--”

“Thuxra was destroyed by an earthquake,” Gyalo said sharply.

“No, no!” The boy shook his head, his long hair swinging. “That’s just what everyone thought. It was the Next Messenger who did it. He stood before it and told it to fall, and down it came. It made a noise so loud it was like the earth itself opened up its mouth and shouted Ârata’s name!”

Gyalo felt a heaviness in his chest. Till that moment he had held a slim hope that the boy had only encountered some god-crazed itinerant prophet. Even six years after the Caryaxists’ defeat, there was no shortage of these. But the boy knew the truth about Thuxra. That made it certain.

Râvar.

“And then he said--the holy man said--that the Next Messenger was summoning the faithful, and anyone who believed could come to the city he had made, the Awakened City, and live in holiness. And it was like...it was like the world turned over underneath me! I don’t remember getting up, I was just there, in front of him. He took my face into his hands and kissed me, and told me what I had to do. And that night I did it. I swore myself to the Messenger’s service. There was--” He drew his bandaged hand a little closer against his body. “A ritual. Then they told me how to go to him in his stronghold.”

“His stronghold? You know where he is?”

“I know how to get there.” The boy grinned. “But if you want to know, scribe, you’ll have to do the ritual. He’s at the Red Lantern on Shiriya Street in the western quarter--the holy man, I mean. You’ll know him by the scar on his neck, a prison-collar scar. He doesn’t try to hide it.” His expression grew dreamy. “They say the Messenger is beautiful, more beautiful than any human man. They say he’s clothed in light. He made the place where we’re going, made it with his power so the faithful could have shelter. They eat the food of the gods there, and every day the Messenger works a miracle.”

Gyalo could not restrain himself. “There’s nothing miraculous about it.”

The boy drew back, affronted. “What do you know about it, scribe?”

“This is a fraud, boy. A cheat. A lie to blacken your soul.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Listen to me.” Gyalo willed into his voice the authority of the religious rank he had once held. “You’ve been deceived. This so-called Messenger is false. There’s no holiness at the end of your journey, only suffering and blasphemy.”

The boy surged to his feet, oversetting the stool, and spat on the worn flagstones beside him. “That’s how much I care for what you think, scribe! You’re just an ash-cursed unbeliever like all the rest. When I’m living in bliss in the new primal age, you’ll still be roasting in Ârata’s fires. And I hope you scream so much you tear your throat out!”

He wrenched around, and was gone in a blur of copper light.

For a moment Gyalo sat looking after him. He was aware of the regard of the nearby scribes and their customers, their interest drawn by the boy’s raised voice. Stupid, he chided himself. Secure as he was in his new life, he still had the habits of a fugitive; he did not like to attract attention.

He returned to the task of packing up, loading his desk and other materials into his push-cart and binding a canvas cover over the whole. He maneuvered the cart across the uneven pavement toward the temple’s entrance, where stood a bronze image of Inriku, holding the symbols of his patronage in his hands. The image was modeled in a contemporary style, no doubt to replace an original destroyed by the Caryaxists; its clean sharp contours did not quite fit the time-smoothed stones and columns of its home. Before it, separated by the requisite distance, a smaller image of Ârata Eon Sleeper reclined upon a plinth. This was Inriku’s temple, but all who entered it must acknowledge that Inriku was only an Aspect of the greater god, dreamed into being during Ârata’s long slumber. On all four sides of the plinth, the Five Foundations of the Way were written out, words that were recognizable even to those who could not read: Faith, Affirmation, Increase, Consciousness, Compassion.

On the temple’s broad porch Gyalo paused to exchange his indoor shoes for a pair of high-soled sandals, then bumped his cart down the shallow steps and joined the procession of human and animal traffic. Shops and houses crowded on either side, their roofs tiled red and green and yellow, their fronts festooned with shuttered balconies. An unseasonable heat had settled on the city, and the air was summer-thick with stink: animals, cooking, sewage, the smoke of a thousand braziers. From all directions came the sound of temple bells, announcing evening services. These things Gyalo perceived with his ordinary senses. But he was a free Shaper, and so he also perceived what ordinary senses could not encompass: the gemlike light shed by all living things, the patterns of being and change that composed unliving objects, which a free Shaper could manipulate at will--though to do so openly would be to break ecclesiastical law, which for all intents and purposes was also civil law, and transform himself again into a fugitive.

He reached one of the many bridges that spanned the Year-Canal, the great water thoroughfare that split the city into northern and southern halves, and joined the slow line of traffic across it. He had often felt conspicuous when he first came to Ninyâser, for he had been born in the Chonggyean city of Rimpang, where the Brethren had fled after the Caryaxist rebellion, and his eyes and skin proclaimed him an outsider. But in the past two years the trickle of immigration spurred by the Caryaxists’ fall had become a flood--vowed Âratists arriving to repopulate the nunneries and monasteries, merchants and artisans and laborers and thieves seeking opportunities in a newly-opened land, where King Santaxma’s many public works projects, lavishly funded by his exploitation of the Burning Land, offered more employment than there were people to employ. It was no longer uncommon to encounter Chonggyeans and Ainoi and Tapati--or even, sometimes, men and women with the distinctive pale skins and round eyes of Isar and Yahaz, the only Galean kingdoms that did not worship Ârata.

On the Canal’s south side the streets grew meaner, the buildings more ramshackle; if Gyalo continued on for half a mile he would come upon the Nines, a sprawling slum that clung to the city’s southern flank. But the sections nearest the Canal possessed a kind of shabby gentility, and four months ago, on the strength of a new copying commission, he had rented a house on a small enclosed court, with a roof of green-glazed tiles and a tiny garden in the back. He and Axane had worked for weeks, cleaning, replastering, painting. Like him, Axane had never lived in a house of her own. He still caught her, sometimes, looking around her as if she could not quite believe it; it made him smile, for he felt the same.

He pushed the cart across the ancient paving of the court, rounding the fountain that bubbled at its center (a rare amenity in that part of the city, and one of the reasons they had taken the house), nodding a greeting to his neighbors. He chained the cart beside the door, which he had painted green to match the roof, and carried his materials inside, leaving his sandals on the mat. The interior was simple--one room and a kitchen downstairs, a single long chamber upstairs where he had a desk, and he and Axane and the baby slept. As yet they owned only the meager furnishings from the apartment where they had lived before. But bare as it was, Gyalo was more content than in any of the finely appointed suites he had commanded in his monastic days, when he had had access to all the luxury of one who served the Brethren.

“I’m home,” he called, and went into the kitchen, where Axane, enclosed in the astonishing emerald-sapphire of her lifelight, was slicing onions for the evening meal. She dropped her knife and turned toward him, smiling; he closed her into an embrace, her sea colors filling up his vision. When they were first reunited, he had not been able to stop touching her, as if her body were bound to his by the same force that pulls a dropped object inevitably to the ground. When she was not with him he had felt unbearably restrained, wanting always to fall toward her. They had been together for eight months (and married for all but one day of that time), and the urgency had eased. But there were still no moments in his life as sweet as these, when he held her in his arms.

She pulled away and returned to her preparations. “It’ll be a little while, I’m afraid. I was called out this afternoon. It took longer than I expected.”

“Was it bad?”

“A little girl bitten by a street dog. She needed stitching. Her father waited two days before he called for me, and it wasn’t because he couldn’t pay. It made me so angry I charged half again what I normally would have.”

Gyalo smiled. When he had first met her, she had not understood the use of currency, for she had grown up in a place that did not employ it. But she had become as sharp with money as anyone he had ever known. “A paying customer. How unusual.”

“They all pay, Gyalo, just not always in coin. I know you don’t like me helping the poor ones. But the registered healers won’t, and all they have is someone like me.”

“It’s you going down into the Nines that I don’t like.”

“I never go alone.”

It was an old argument. Axane was fiercely devoted to her healing craft, which she had insisted on following into the eighth month of her pregnancy, and had taken up again only a few weeks after Chokyi’s birth. She had been angered by the restrictions of Ninyâser’s registration requirements, which, being who and what she was, she could not fulfill; but she had found a different mission in her service among the poor. Gyalo was aware that most men of his income and profession would not have permitted their wives to go out as she did, or tolerated the late suppers and dusty corners that resulted. But in the profoundly isolated community into which Axane had been born, everyone had worked, and it had not occurred to her that she should not be a healer in Arsace as well. In truth, Gyalo had as little experience of the world’s conventions as she. Between them they did what seemed right, rather than what was proper, and thus far it had worked out very well.

From her basket near the stove, Chokyi began to cry. “Would you see to her, love?” Axane said. “My hands are all over onions.”

Gyalo went to lift the baby, warm and milky-smelling in her linen wrappings. She quieted at his touch. He carried her to the kitchen door, open against the heat of the room, and settled on the threshold. She gurgled at him, waving tiny fists.

“Little bird,” he whispered. “Little bird.”

She was not his child. She did not even have similar features, for both her father and Axane were of a different racial stock than he, round-eyed and dark-skinned where he was almond-eyed and pale. But from the beginning he had loved her completely--he, who had never thought to be a father or a husband. They had named her for his mother. Her lifelight, which like Axane’s leaped flamelike around her body, was the color of apple jade.

He sat in the doorway, the dozing baby in his arms, as the soft spring twilight descended on the garden and Axane moved about the kitchen. Ordinarily he took deep pleasure in such moments of tranquil domesticity, the heart and essence of the new life he led. But he could not banish the young pilgrim from his mind, and below the peace of the evening the unease the encounter had woken in him stirred like an incipient sickness.

When the meal was ready he put Chokyi in her basket and carried her out to the low table in the other room, and lit the lamps and drew the shutters while Axane set out the food. They sat across from one another on cushions and talked of small things as they ate. All the while his thoughts kept returning to the boy. At last he said, across the end of one of Axane’s sentences:

“A customer came to me today for a letter.”

She stilled at once, perhaps hearing something in his voice, and listened without interrupting as he told her the boy’s story. When he was finished she drew a long breath, and said: “Râvar.”

The name lingered on the air. They sat listening to its echoes. Chokyi slept on the floor, plump arms clasped atop her covers. Lamplight trembled on the walls, into whose plaster Gyalo had mixed a yellow tint so they would look sunlit even in shadow.

“How long has it been?” Axane said. “Since his missionaries were ordered out of Ninyâser?”

“Seven months at least.”

“And now they’re back.”

“Or maybe they never left. Maybe they just went underground. Recruiting by word of mouth, rather than by public proselytizing.”

It was hard to talk of this. Just after they were reunited, Axane had told Gyalo everything: how, after her escape from Baushpar, she had inserted herself among the camp followers of the Brethren’s army so she might get across the Burning Land and warn her people, how she and Râvar escaped Refuge’s destruction and the massacre that followed, how Râvar dragged her back across the desert, and, at the end of that harsh journey, brought down the walls of Thuxra City and declared himself Next Messenger before a throng of awestruck prisoners. She and Gyalo had speculated about where Râvar might be hiding, when he might emerge, how much of his planned vengeance he might accomplish--conjectures that contained no ifs, but only whens. But then Râvar’s missionaries, who had begun openly preaching in Ninyâser several weeks before Axane arrived, were ejected by decree of the king. It had felt like a reprieve. For a little while it became possible to ignore the approaching darkness, to immerse themselves in the joys and challenges of their life as if there were no other future. Since the missionaries’ departure, neither had spoken Râvar’s name aloud.

Gyalo looked at his wife. She sat very still, her face calm, her eyes cast down, her hands folded neatly in her lap. To someone who did not know her, it might have seemed the pose of a quiet woman, at ease within her world, tranquil in her thoughts. But Gyalo did know her, knew the truth of her restless, fierce nature, which for much of her life she had kept hidden. He understood, therefore, that what he saw was not tranquillity, but concealment. It was when she was most still that she was least like herself.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Ah,” he said.

“I’ve begun dreaming again.” Axane was a Dreamer, one whose mind was capable of traveling out across the world in sleep. In the late stages of her pregnancy her Dreams had ceased; he knew that without them she felt blind. This should, therefore, have been good news. But her manner told him it was not, and it seemed to him he had already heard her next words, even as she spoke them: “About Râvar.”

It was inevitable, he told himself. It had to happen. “For how long?”

“Since just after Chokyi was born.”

“What? You’ve been dreaming about him for four months and you never told me?”

She did not look at him. “I’m telling you now.”

“Ârata’s wounds, Axane! How many of these Dreams have you had?”

“Nine or ten, maybe. They take me to the place where he lives with his followers.” She had begun to turn her rice bowl between her hands, around and around on the glossy surface of the table. “It’s a cave, or rather a lot of caves, all interconnected. I think...there must be a thousand people living there. Maybe more.”

“So many? Are you sure?”

“We knew he planned to build an army, didn’t we?” She gave the bowl a savage twist. “It’s very organized. There are living areas, places where they make things--clothing, furnishings, tools. There are food stores. It’s like a little city.”

“The Awakened City,” Gyalo said, hearing the boy.

“What?”

“The Awakened City. That’s what they call it. Can you tell where it is?”

She shook her head. “I’ve only seen the caves. Never what’s outside them.”

“Have you seen anything to tell you what he’s planning?”

“I’m only there when people are asleep, Gyalo. I don’t hear them talking. Even when I dream of...him, he’s always alone.” She shuddered, a tremor that ran through her from head to foot. “All I know is that there are a lot of them. And they keep coming.”

Gyalo sat silent. A thousand, he thought. It did not surprise him, not at all. Yet it was one thing to suspect, another to know.

Axane said: “You’re angry.”

“No.” But that was not exactly true. “Axane, you shouldn’t have waited so long to tell me.”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Worry me? Axane--”

“Do you think I want to dream of him?” She pushed her bowl away, sharply, so that it skated across the table. “I’m bound to him by blood, by Chokyi’s blood, and...and by Refuge--” She dragged in her breath. “As bound to him in a way as I am to you, for all he doesn’t know it. You know what that means for me. Some of the time...some of the time I can fight it. I can make myself wake up. But I can’t stop the dreaming, any more than I could not dream you when we were apart.”

“I know that, Axane.”

“What would have been the good of telling you? It’s not as if it would have changed anything. I knew you’d hate it, I knew you’d just get angry, the way you are now. You think of him, I know you do--I see the way you look at Chokyi sometimes. As if...as if you were judging her.”

Gyalo felt a stab of guilt, for he did sometimes look into Chokyi’s face and search for her father there. “I don’t judge her.”

“No? She has his eyes! His skin! How can you look into her face and not see him? How can you not think of...of...of...”

“I don’t think of that. Axane, I don’t judge her, and I don’t judge you. Why should I, when you judge yourself so harshly?” She drew in her breath, turned her face away. “You know that, just as you know I love Chokyi. As you know I love you.”

“Oh, Gyalo.” Her voice cracked. “I’m sorry.”

“My love, I understand.”

“I should have told you about the Dreams. But I didn’t want to speak of him. I didn’t want to say his name. I’m so happy, with you and Chokyi, but I feel...sometimes I feel I must be imagining it all, and any minute I’ll look around and none of it will be true. I feel that if I stop paying attention it’ll all turn to smoke and blow away, and I’ll be in the Burning Land again, with him...”

Gyalo pushed himself off his cushion and went to her. She clutched the fabric of his shirt and buried her face in his shoulder. “This is real,” he said into her hair. “It can’t vanish. Do you believe me?”

Against his shoulder, she nodded.

“No more secrets, Axane. Promise me. When you dream him, you must tell me. This is our burden, both of us together.”

“I promise,” she whispered.

He tightened his arms around her and closed his eyes against her light, breathing her in. If, when he was still a vowed Âratist, he had been asked whether he regretted renouncing a life like the one he now lived, he would in all honesty have said no. Though he struggled sometimes with the celibacy his religious service required, he had never felt any great grief, as some of his colleagues did, to be barred from the secular comforts of marriage and family. But that was only because he had not understood. He still did not entirely comprehend how to live this new life of his, which often seemed like a complicated city whose streets he would never fully know, whose turns and junctions could not be anticipated, but only chosen, one by one, as he encountered them. Yet for every blind alley, for every wrong turning, there was this simple wonder: the weight of another’s body, the cage of another’s arms. Far more precious to him, perhaps, than to someone who had not discovered them so late.

“Do you think,” he said softly after a time, “that he may actually have come to believe himself the Next Messenger?”

“No.” He felt her voice against his chest. “To blaspheme against the god he rejected. To come as a counterfeit Messenger to Galea, as he thinks you came as a counterfeit Messenger to Refuge. To destroy the Brethren, as they destroyed our people. He must not just be false, but know himself as false. It won’t be the proper revenge otherwise.”

“It’s such a huge deception. Surely at some point he will stumble. Give himself away.”

“That’s what I’ve been hoping. Arsace was strange to me when you first brought me here, but I was prepared, because I’d been dreaming it for so long. But all he knew was what I told him while we were traveling. At the end... he still spoke as if he thought everything beyond the Burning Land was a realm of demons.”

“He cannot think that now.”

“I wish I’d lied when he asked me all those questions. Misguided him. You know how I feel about the Brethren. If it were only them he meant to harm, I wouldn’t care. But there’s everyone else, all the people he’s cheated into false belief, everyone who’ll suffer when he emerges.”

“You didn’t know to lie. He never told you what he was planning.”

“I could have stopped him, Gyalo. Bashed his head in with a rock while he slept. I thought of doing it, after...” She bit off the words. “I think I could have. I hated him enough. But then I would have died too, all alone in the Burning Land without his shaping to make food and water for me. And I didn’t want to die.”

There was a painful savagery in her voice. Gyalo knew the shadow that lived in her: her grief for her father and for her people, her guilt for what she believed was her part in Refuge’s destruction, her terrible shame and rage at the rape she had suffered at Râvar’s hands. It had changed her. There was a hardness in her that had not been present when he first knew her. It was another of the things they never talked about. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had spoken of the matters they were discussing now, or allowed him to speak of them.

“You didn’t know,” he said again. “Don’t blame yourself for what can’t be changed.”

“But I don’t want to change it, Gyalo! If I could go back to the beginning and do it all again, I wouldn’t do any of it differently. Because then I wouldn’t have you or the life we have together, here in this world where I don’t have to hide what I am, where I don’t have to pretend to believe in things I know aren’t true. And do you know what that means, Gyalo? It means I wish my people dead. It means I wish my father dead.”

“Oh, love,” Gyalo said, stroking her hair. “Why do you torment yourself like this?”

She pulled away from him. “He can’t succeed,” she said. “Something will go wrong. He’ll betray himself. Or maybe the king will act, once he emerges.”

She did not sound as if she believed it.

Chokyi woke and began to cry. Axane lifted the baby from the basket and unfastened the pin at the shoulder of her dress so Chokyi could nurse. “There, little bird,” she said. Her downturned face smoothed, grew intent. For a little while Gyalo watched, feeling the odd blend of tenderness and exclusion that always gripped him at such times. Then he got to his feet and fetched his box of writing implements from beside the door, and took a lamp from a side-table and went upstairs.

His desk was not a real desk, but three wide boards that he had sanded smooth, supported on stacks of scavenged brick. Candles stood in pottery saucers--beeswax, not tallow, for their clear smokeless light. He kindled them from the lamp and set to work on his current copying commission. He had worried, when he first took up scribing, that he would find it insupportably dull after the complex duties he had performed as aide to the Son Utamnos. But though he missed the scholarship of his former life--missed it painfully sometimes, especially access to a library--he had learned to appreciate scribing’s lack of challenge: the simplicity of instructions that allowed no latitude, of tasks that required no interpretation, of work that on completion vanished from his life forever. It was even, once he mastered the trick of copying without thinking about the meaning of the words, a little like meditation.

He sank into the rhythm of the work. The sharp edges of the evening smoothed away. He was aware of Axane moving about downstairs, then nearby. The wash of candlelight shaded green. Warm arms went around his shoulders.

“Put out the candles, love,” she whispered.

He snuffed the flames and followed her to the bed. She had left the shutters open against the heat; the moon, nearly full, printed dim bars of silver on the floor. She shone much brighter, a jewel held to the sun--emerald, sapphire, lapis, jade. He fell into her embrace as if into water. The shock of her bare skin against his own was always, somehow, like the first time. Her radiance wrapped him like the currents of the sea, slipping along his body, streaming through his eyes and nose and open mouth, as if for a little while they passed together into a different element and swam tides beyond the world.

#

Gyalo was in his office in the Evening City. Lamps burned in niches on the walls; trays of candles danced with flame, illuminating lacquered cabinets and crowded document-cases, a pair of iron braziers, his desk strewn with bound books and folios and scrolls. Before him was a sheet of paper; inscribed on it, in the blocky characters of the Chonggyean language to which he had been born, were the syllables of his name.

He set the brush he held on its stand. He looked down at himself: He wore the loose red gown and trousers of a vowed Âratist, and his arms and shoulders were draped with a golden Shaper stole. His scalp was naked, his chin clean-shaven. He could feel the tether of manita, a tight clenching at his center. His vision was the vision of an ordinary man.

Emotion rose in him, a strange mix of sorrow and relief. “A dream,” he whispered. His journey into the Burning Land, his discoveries there, his apostasy...Axane. All a dream.

His hand fell to his chest in a gesture of long habit, seeking his simulacrum, the smaller replica of the First Messenger’s great necklace that all vowed Âratists wore. But his fingers found only the fabric of his stole. In sudden panic he felt around his neck: It was bare. His simulacrum was gone.

He rose and crossed his office. The copy-room beyond was deserted. He paced between the desks, searching for the gleam of gold. Finding nothing, he left the copy-room for the labyrinth of the Evening City, traversing halls and passageways, courts and galleries, rooms and suites and reception chambers. His simulacrum was nowhere to be found. In all that vast and magnificent space, there seemed to be no living soul except himself.

He came at last to a passage with walls of rough red stone. The air smelled familiar--of dust, of dryness, of rock cracked by the hammer of the sun. Beneath it, faintly, he caught the aromatic scent of...bitterbark? And suddenly a searing wind struck him and he was in the Burning Land, red soil and gray-green scrub spreading out forever beneath a harsh cobalt sky. The sun drilled down like an auger; his shadow was the merest puddle at his feet. The air was almost too hot to breathe.

Ahead he saw a human form, distorted with distance and the metallic tides of heat. He started toward it, his feet catching in the low vegetation. It waited, unmoving; he could see its ragged garments, its tangled black hair. There was something deeply familiar in that straight, square-shouldered stance. All at once he knew; and with that recognition, they were face-to-face.

“Teispas,” he said.

The captain smiled. He looked as he had during their ordeal in the Burning Land: dark skin scabbed and peeling with sunburn, hawk face half-hidden behind a bush of beard. He held his cupped hands toward Gyalo. Fire flashed upon his palms.

“I’ve been saving it for you,” he said.

It was the lost simulacrum. Gyalo reached to take it. But the sun-heated metal scorched his fingers, and he gasped and dropped it. It fell more slowly than was natural; he could count each link of the gold neck chain, each wire of the golden cage suspended from it, each facet of the glass jewel the cage contained, each swirl of the iridescent metal at the jewel’s heart, cunningly crafted to mimic the true Blood’s core of living flame. It struck the ground, sending up a little puff of red dust.

“You must pick it up,” Teispas said.

An immense weariness swept over Gyalo. The brilliant world around him seemed to dim. “But it’s only a copy.”

Teispas shook his head, as if in disappointment. The wind lifted his hair and tossed it across his face.

“Teispas--” Gyalo knew now he was dreaming. The grief that filled his throat came from his waking self, rising out of sleep. Still he said the words he always said, for dreams were the only place in which Teispas heard them: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Teispas’s face was drawn in lines of agony. He turned. His tunic was torn; Gyalo saw the marks of the lash, weals that opened to the bone.

“Teispas,” he called. “Teispas--”

And he was awake.

The scars on his hands throbbed, as they did when he grew agitated. Tears had tracked from the corners of his eyes into his hair. He rubbed them away and sat up. The bars of moonlight on the floor had barely moved. Axane lay huddled on the edge of the bed, wreathed in shifting color.

He pulled on his trousers and checked on Chokyi, and by his own pale light padded down the stairs. In the kitchen he drew a dipper of water from the cask and drank, then unbarred the door and went out into the garden. It was a tiny space, enclosed by walls of the same yellow brick as the house. Axane had dug herb beds, and with typical enterprise had traded healing services to a mason for a stone path with a little paved rectangle at its midpoint, on which sat a wooden bench. The mason had pounded the earth and laid a bed of gravel so the stones would sit firm--to the ordinary eye a neat and pleasing work, but to Gyalo’s Shaper senses riven with imperfection, for he could see the stress-lines where the stones would eventually crack, the areas of instability where they would rise and shift, and of course the patterns of their being, which told him not simply what kind of stone they were, but how they had been formed and how they would decay and how he might, if he chose, transform them into something else or even banish them entirely. Nothing in the world was static; everything, at every moment, held within itself the whole cycle of its growth and dissolution, every possibility of metamorphosis and destruction.

He sat on the bench and rubbed his palms together, trying to soothe the ache. Nearby the herb plants shed their little lights; the moon looked down, its face almost the exact hue of his own radiance, and the air stirred with the rising heat of stone and brick and tile. Beyond the quiet of the enclosure, he could hear the sporadic night sounds of Ninyâser: shouting, someone tossing liquid out a window, the barking of dogs.

Often when he could not sleep he sought the calm of meditation, one of the few habits he retained from his monastic days. He knew better than to try that now. In the humid city darkness, he could almost catch the arid whiff of stone and dust and bitter herbs that was the odor of the Burning Land. The moment he closed his eyes, he would see Teispas’s bloody back again.

He did not know if Teispas had died of the lash. But he did know that the captain had perished in captivity in King Santaxma’s dungeons in Ninyâser, long before Râvar came out of the Burning Land. It was Diasarta who discovered this, over the course of many months of patient inquiry and a small fortune paid in bribes.

“You didn’t really think we’d find him alive, did you?” Diasarta had said when he came to give the news. “You had to expect this.”

Gyalo had. But, sitting stunned with grief and guilt, he found it made little difference.

“It isn’t your fault,” Diasarta said. “He chose to stay.”

“I should have known. I should have done more to make him go.”

Diasarta shook his head. “He’d never have left you.”

Gyalo knew it was true. In his mind’s eye, he saw the series of events he had not witnessed, but had conjured so many times in imagination it almost seemed as if he had: Axane and Diasarta, crawling after Teispas across the Evening City’s maze of interconnected roofs. Teispas, balanced on the ridgeline where the roofs butted up against the outer wall, lowering a rope for the other two to slide down; then, having secretly made up his mind not to accompany them, starting to draw it up again. Diasarta, realizing his intent, leaping instinctively to grab the rope, causing Teispas to slip. The crashing of loosened roof tiles in the court below: the alerted servants, the summoned guards. And, grafted seamlessly to this parade of invention, the moment for which Gyalo had actually been present: Teispas, bound and bruised and on his knees before the leader of the Brethren, declaring that he and Diasarta and Axane had plotted alone to escape Baushpar, and Gyalo was ignorant of their plan. When in fact it had been Gyalo, realizing too late that the Brethren suspected them all of heresy, who had ordered his companions to go.

“It’s funny, y’know,” Diasarta said. “He was such a bloody arrogant man. There were times in the Burning Land when I hated his guts. Even later on I can’t say I ever really got to like him.”

Gyalo nodded. He had felt much the same.

“But we were part of something, y’know? What we went through in the desert...it binds you, a thing like that. Ârata help me, I grieve for him the same as for my brother. And I loved my brother.”

Axane and Diasarta had not been recaptured, though the Brethren had searched for them. Teispas was hauled off for interrogation by the king, who dreaded heresy as much as the Brethren did, if for different reasons. Gyalo was sent into imprisonment, both for his apostasy and (he realized only later) for the sake of the Brethren’s fear of him. And the Brethren bought an army from Santaxma, and dispatched it into the Burning Land to obliterate the people of Refuge. Thus, in grief and bloodshed, ended the task that Gyalo had believed, then, had been given him by Ârata himself: to bring news of the god’s rising to the Brethren and prepare them for Ârata’s return.

Now, amid the quiet garden, a different memory swept him, its gem-bright immediacy undiminished by the years that divided it from this moment: Teispas, mantled in the cobalt lifelight that had been absent from Gyalo’s dream. Teispas’s voice, harsh in the inhuman silence of the desert night: You really don’t see it, do you. That you are the Next Messenger.

Gyalo drew a breath, shuddering. For four years those words had overlooked his life. While he lived, Teispas had not allowed Gyalo to forget them. Dead, he came in dreams, to insert into Gyalo’s sleep the reproaches he could no longer utter in waking time.

Gyalo had turned from him that night in horror, hardly able to believe that Teispas, that hard and pragmatic man, could make the same error the people of Refuge had. But though the hubris of it stopped his breath, he could not entirely deny the pattern Teispas saw: the message he bore, the Blood he carried, exactly as foretold in Ârata’s Promise. Over time he came, struggling, some way toward belief. But beyond the thought-twisting isolation of the desert, what had seemed terrifyingly possible--or at least, not entirely deniable--became preposterous. Who was he to name himself the god’s herald? He carried news of Ârata’s rising, yes, but by chance discovery, not divine revelation. The Blood had not been given him by Ârata, but by Axane, who had pilfered it from the Cavern. How could he, a mortal man, accomplish what the Next Messenger must accomplish--open the way, whatever that meant, and bring an end to the Age of Exile? Where were the acts of destruction and generation that were supposed to follow on the Next Messenger’s arrival? To understand those things was like waking from an awful dream in which he had forgotten who he was. By the time he reached Baushpar, he had rejected any significance in the manner of his return--though Teispas and Diasarta, for all his efforts to dissuade them, suffered no such change of heart.

He had known the Brethren would imprison him. Even if they had believed him, it was the sentence for apostasy, an inevitable consequence of his return. He had not imagined any possibility of reprieve. But then, incredibly, the chance for escape had come--in the form of Diasarta, who tracked him to Faal, the isolated monastery where he was confined. Teispas’s pattern had seemed to flicker again, like lightning along a far horizon: Ârata’s hand reaching into his life once more, offering a second chance. In dread and obedience he had embraced freedom, finally and forever renouncing the church and its strictures on his shaping, transforming himself thereby into the thing he had been taught all his life to know as anathema: a true apostate, an unbound Shaper whose liberty had not been forced, but chosen.

Uneasy in his liberty, he waited for a sign, some confirmation that his choice had been correct. Great Ârata, he prayed, am I your Messenger? What is my duty? What must I do? Ârata awake was as silent as Ârata sleeping; it did not entirely surprise him that no answer came. Yet during the bitter days of his imprisonment he had come to doubt nearly everything he had done or chosen, even whether Ârata had meant him to bring word to the Brethren; and while this made clear to him the risks of human assumption--including doubt--in matters of the divine, it left him little certain ground on which to stand. So much in him had shifted: his altered view of the Sons and Daughters he once had served so faithfully, his changing comprehension of what his time among them had really been meant to accomplish, his stumbling sense that the church’s control of shaping--whose necessity he had once accepted as he accepted the rhythm of his own pulse--was in some deep way mistaken. Free for the first time in his life, he found himself unable to move forward, either to take the final step into belief or turn his back upon the question once and for all.

Then Axane dreamed her way back to him--as he had hoped, but not quite dared believe, she would--and in the joy of their reunion he forgot the questions for a while. It had really seemed, in those early days, that they might set the past aside and date their lives from the moment of their marriage--as if that had been the point, as if all the suffering and betrayal and destruction had been meant only to bring the two of them together. At last, Gyalo told himself, he would set duty aside. He would be an ordinary man--a husband, a father, a scribe, rising each day to go to his work, returning nightly to his family. From these simple actions he would build a life. When, at its end, he looked back upon the events that had terminated his Âratist service, he would find them as strange and unlikely as a dream.

But he had never been skilled at self-deception. The silence he and Axane had built across the past did not banish it, but only made a fiction of the present. Since Chokyi’s birth he had found it increasingly difficult to ignore the artificiality of his life--which was not, after all, a bright new world he had created for himself, but only a wall desperately thrown up in a vain attempt to exclude what lay outside.

The wall had been breached this evening, by Axane’s revelation of her Dreams. Eventually, perhaps, she would learn the location of Râvar’s stronghold. Another choice would stand before Gyalo then: he who was also a Shaper, who knew what Râvar was and the havoc he intended.

Fear closed a fist inside Gyalo’s chest. Râvar was hugely powerful, freakishly so. Beside the great wind of Râvar’s shaping, Gyalo’s own ability was a breath, a sigh. Nor had he employed it since his escape from Faal--not once, even in the smallest way. In part it was for fear of discovery. But it was a different fear that really held his ability prisoner--as firmly tethered, in a sense, as it had been when he was still bound by vows and by the Doctrine of Baushpar.

Did he have to choose? Ârata had risen. In these last of days, was it still necessary to stand against atrocity? Did even blasphemy matter, at the close of the Age of Exile? Râvar was hidden now, gathering himself like some malignant sickness, but once he emerged the eye of the world would be upon him. Surely, as Axane had said, the king would not tolerate such disruption. Surely Râvar would stumble or go too far, and tear the veil of his deception. He could not succeed. He could not.

Gyalo’s hands still burned. He opened them, looked down at the white welts that crossed his palms and fingers. The scars were a legacy of Refuge, of the Cavern of the Blood; in his wonder, he had fallen to his knees and touched the crystals, forgetting their razor facets, opening up his flesh. The scar tissue was stiff; he could not completely straighten the fingers of either hand, or close them firmly into fists. It made him clumsy sometimes. But he was still adept enough to write, to lift Chokyi, to touch Axane. To do what was important.

For a moment, with a sharp sense of shame, he recalled the relief that had filled him in his dream, to think he had only imagined the past five years. There had been grief as well. But the relief had been very powerful.

He bowed his face into his palms. “Ârata,” he whispered, “risen god of all the world, forgive my hesitation. Forgive my uncertainty. Forgive me for wishing it were easier. I am and always have been your servant. Only let me know what it is you want me to do. Please, great Ârata. Show me how to choose.”

The words flew out into the night. Because he was an honest man, Gyalo also heard the words he did not speak, the prayer that lay behind all the rest: Let it not be me. Let it not be me.