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The Awakened City
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The passage kinked. He could hear the crowd--a rushing sound that reminded him, briefly, of the hiss of wind across the meadows of his lost home. Ahead, a slash of brightness split the passage’s black. He increased his pace, launching himself into the illumination as if into water.
Below, on the tumbled and stalagmited floor of a deep cavern, his faithful massed more than a thousand strong. To his Shaper senses they were not just a throng of men and women, but a roiling play of color and light, stippled here and there with the ordinary flame of torches. At the sight of him, they roared. He stood above them on the ledge he had made, his radiant arms spread wide, their adulation pouring like sunlight into the dark void at his center. He was warm now, warm as the heat-patterns the torches printed on the substance of the air. He threw back his head and laughed.
“People!” he shouted. 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 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 invariable. In the beginning, his calls and their responses had altered with each ceremony. But now the cadences were constant, 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 will upon the air below his feet so that it grew slow and thick, allowing him to drift leaflike to the cavern’s floor. Unlike the illusory brilliance in which he was clad, this was real shaping, accompanied by the flash and thunder all transformation made, but to his followers, who because of the strange proscriptions of this world had never witnessed unfettered shaping, his descent was not the exercise of a human power, but a miracle. He allowed his shimmering attire to billow as he fell, so they might glimpse his body; he knew that that he was beautiful to both men and women, and that for many, faith was most urgent when it was bound to carnal longing.
He alighted gently on the broken rock. 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 in their faces seemed to flow from a single heart.
He stepped toward them. They parted like grass, those closest to him sinking to their knees. Slowly he walked among them, his hands held before him, palms out, 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 need 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 had learned to crave: their awe, their adoration, which for a little while filled up the emptiness in him where those same passions once had lived.
“Messenger,” they sighed. “Beloved One. Most beautiful.”
He made a single circuit of the cavern. Then he left them for the heights above, 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--but to his huge gift it was nothing. On the overhang again, he turned toward the faithful. They responded--not a roar this time, but a rumble, a mutter, which was somehow more powerful than the greater noise. He imagined he could feel it under his bare feet.
“People of the Promise.”
“Beloved One.” Many held up their palms, showing him the proof of their faith. “Child of Ârata.”
“You who have gathered here in Ârata’s name. You who have woken to the truth. You who in understanding have chosen me, and thus become my father’s chosen. Look upon the sign my father has given, the sign of his rising, the sign of his will, the sign that his age-old promise soon will be fulfilled.”
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.
“It is my task to bear this Blood, and my father’s will, into a world that does not yet know me.” The hugeness of the falsehood shook him, the completeness of the blasphemy. “It is your task also, you citizens of this holy community, this Awakened City. With me, you will open the way for Ârata’s return, and bring an end to the Age of Exile.”
“Ârata,” they chanted. “Ârata who slept. Ârata who has risen. Ârata who will return.”
“Abide now with me, in anticipation of the fulfillment of this sacred purpose. Abide in expectation of the sign that will reveal the predestined moment of our emergence. Abide in eagerness for the work that we will do when we march upon the lands beyond these mountains, and to their ignorance and corruption shout the truth we know--that Ârata has risen! That the time of cleansing is at hand, when all will be seared clean in the god’s holy fires! That the primal age approaches, and soon will reign anew!”
“In faith we abide! In love we abide! In strength we abide!”
“I give you blessing now, in my name 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 pulse of sound, and from the air above the crowd burst a rain of gold. They shouted, jumping, shoving one another, snatching at the treasure. 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.
Fools, he thought, looking down at them. 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, and he shuddered. With his shaping he controlled the elements, the very framework 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 abandoned the illusion that clothed him, the gaudy trappings of the role he played, and strode through the mountain’s heart with only the light of his own life to guide him, and, on his chest, the trembling fire of Ârata’s Blood.
In his private domain, a succession of cave-rooms that he had shaped and altered in very particular ways, he sought the third chamber, where a circular well was punched into the 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 on the floor--gently, for in spite of everything he could not quite break himself of the habit of reverence.
He unwound his breechclout and slid into the warmth, sighing. He lay with his eyes closed, his long 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, behind it, a 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 he could still sense the silence, waiting underneath.
It will be different soon, he told himself. 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 had believed in a listening god.
He tightened his belt and stamped into his boots (nomad-made, their toes shod with silver), and left his quarters, to walk the blind 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.
Excerpted from The Awakened City by Victoria Strauss. Copyright © 2006 by Victoria Strauss. All rights reserved. Excerpted by permission of the publisher. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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