Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

Jelane made a moue. “Politics, junior Awakener. Some of us play and get out of things. Some of you don’t play and so you get to go for wood.”

It wasn’t fair. Pamra conducted herself strictly by the rules, and the favors went to those who broke them. She shut her mouth in a grim line and said nothing. When Pamra became senior, she told herself, Jelane could expect an accounting.

The forest trip required an early start. It was scarce dawn yet, half-dark still, and the first worker lay under her hand, blood trickling between its lax lips before she saw the blue, leaf-shaped mark upon its jaw.

Her hand moved to raise the hood before she could stop herself.

In the instant she had known what would be there. Delia’s eyes, full of knowledge and terrible awareness, staring into her own.

She dropped the hood to stand frozen in position, one hand still holding the dripping flask. A voice that she could not hear, could only feel, screamed inside her, “Strangers. You’re supposed to be a stranger? Always strangers. No one we know. Not our family, our friends, our people. Others. Sinners. People from the east. People who are being punished for the sins and omissions of their lives … Oh, shame! Shame Potipur that he did not take you. Shame Sorters that … that … that … “ But as her voice screamed mindlessly, her eyes saw the little lantern at the eastern lip of the pit and knew it for what it was, knew it for what it had always been-the light to guide the Awakeners from the town to the east to the place they might leave their dead.

There was no Holy Ground. There were no Holy Sorters.

If either of those things had existed, then Delia would not be here. Delia was here, therefore they did not exist.

“Delia!” Her throat bled at the rasping agony of her own cry. A great cloud of black wings rose from the bone pits to circle above her, looking down, aware of her.

“Delia,” sobbing, knowing finally why it was the people scorned the Awakeners, lived by them and hated them. Before her the canvas-covered shape rose up to confront her. Despite the heavy veil, she knew that it saw her still. “A lie,” she whispered, wanting that shape to know that she, Pamra, had been lied to no less than any; used and betrayed no less than they; knowing as she whispered that all the truth had been there for her to read, all the lies open, all her life long, as they had been open and easy to read for children when they woke to find candy on the bed. “A lie,” she said once more, hopelessly, disbelieving it. Not even a pious myth. Merely a blasphemy.

She could not bear the blank canvas of the hood. She could not bear what lay behind it. She turned to flee, only to turn again. If she left, another Awakener would come to begin the long punishment, the seasons of unending labor while the flesh reawakened by the Tears of Viranel diminished slowly through an eternity of time and the rotting .brain within the corrupted flesh counted each hour, each day, until time could be laid down forever in the bone pits to be eaten by the fliers. And then a calm came, a calm more terrible in its cold quiet than the frantic horror that had gone before. She went down into the pit and raised up all the workers who were there, a small pitful. Thirty-five or forty, perhaps. She led them away, chanting them along the road, her mirrored staff casting a glittering warning before her in the rays of cold sun. “Rejoice,” she gargled. “Work awaits you.” Her voice was a mockery. “Work awaits you,”

It was very early. No one saw her go. She led the workers away from the city, away from the Tower, north into the forested lands where they could not be seen, then farther still, farther than she had ever gone before among the endless trees of the road less wilderness, using the blood and Tears for distance only, not for labor. She went in wild ways, guided only by the pale sun, leading a tangled, shambling line that stumbled in its witless wandering through the day, into the evening, into violet dusk. She found a chasm at last, a rocky place, deep and solidly ranked about with high-piled edges of balanced stone. The workers had begun to stumble, but she had driven them on with the last few drops in her flask and then by her voice alone, a harsh cawing, like one of the carrion fliers. She led them onto the sparse brush and hardstone of the chasm, and there she let them drop. There she let Delia fall as well.