No Return

by Zachary Jernigan

  Before leaving, he would visit the parents of Julit Umeda, offering what comfort he could.

  BERUN

  THE 14th OF THE MONTH OF SOLDIERS, 12499 MD

  THE CITY OF GOLNA, NATION OF DARETH HLUM

  The city of Golna, capitol of Dareth Hlum, was an arid splinter in the easternmost flank of the continent of Knoori. Roughly arrowhead-shaped, its southern and northern shores were bordered by the split end of the river Riolsam, which the residents simply called the Sam. On both shores the privileged had built their private estates, beautiful and airy buildings of imported oilwood and glass, outfitted with private docks below broad balconies on stilts.

  The clear waters of the sea some men called Jeru and others called Deathshallow lapped perpetually at the broad eastern beachfront, which the poorest residents called home. Though the shore was undeniably beautiful, beasts had a habit of hauling themselves from the water and terrorizing the citizens along the beach. As a result, the slums’ makeshift defensive wall was forever being repaired.

  The majority of Golna’s million souls did not live near the water, however. They had spread over the rocky, dry-shrubbed hill that dominated the island, segregating themselves into ethnic communities of various sizes and economic stature. Eventually, each came to embrace and jealously guard a principal industry.

  This is how Butchertown became Butchertown. Everyone trusted a Vunni with a knife, as long as it was poised over a sheep or cow carcass. Theirs was not a prosperous community, but it was safe and clean, and it comprised the

  northeast tip of the city. Built into the steep side of the hill, its houses leaned at crazy angles toward the sea. Blood ran in channels into the sea.

  Butchertown was famous for its butchers, of course. Its pastush bakeries— the only ones of their kind outside Vunn itself—were also quite renowned. The city’s most attractive prostitutes lived on the Avenue of Broken Pottery. And the Anadrashi temple in the Square of Nights, O’men As, was generally considered to be Golna’s most austere.

  For close to a decade, however, the community had been known for one thing above all else: the constructed man known as Berun. He had fought in and won many of the fighting tournaments the city had held in the previous eight years. Though strong men had on occasion incapacitated him with the blow of a heavy weapon, only mages and those highly skilled fighters possessing elder-cloth suits stood a likely chance against him.

  He lived on the roof of a Black Suit abbey, home of the Seventeenth Order, though he himself abstained from sectarian violence. Every day from sunrise to mid-afternoon he rested, absorbing the sun’s rays for nourishment. In order to get the most sunlight, he allowed his manlike body to relax completely, spreading into a large circular carpet of dull bronze spheres of varying sizes.

  The two glowing blue coals of his eyes perched on the roof ’s edge, connected to the main mass of his body by a thin tendril of spheres no larger than green peas. He took pleasure in watching the early morning routines—the corral of cows and sheep, the haggling over wares in the ruins of the Shoen Adrashi temple, and the extinguishing of the red magefire lamps lining the Avenue of Broken Pottery.

  The ordinary activities of men fascinated him, though it was a rare occasion when he engaged them on a social level. Too often, such streetside conversations turned into discussions of religion or money, and Berun had little use for either. This afternoon, like most afternoons, would find him in the abbey courtyard, observing the brothers and sisters at practice. Perhaps the abbey master would ask him to help with the training. It amused him to slowly choreograph an attack for the novices, and let them pummel him with their staffs.

  Only large gatherings and other interesting events drew him out of the building. Fights and festivals were his favorites, but he also enjoyed taking part in the charitable works the Seventeenth organized on occasion. There were always buildings to be rebuilt, families to be comforted. The west end of Butchertown bordered Querus, a small Tomen neighborhood. Though both communities professed forms of Anadrashism, neither could agree on the particulars. Bombings, alchemical and chemical, were not uncommon.

  Humans were odd, in Berun’s estimation. Odd in their preoccupations. Surrounded by others of their kind, knowing their concerns were mirrored a hundred thousand times over the course of generations, they still did harm to their neighbors.

  As the sole member of his species, Berun considered this odd, indeed.

  ‡

  In the Month of Bakers he had turned twelve years old. He did not tell anyone, for the age meant nothing. In truth, he was little different from the being he had been upon waking for the first time. Experience left its mark, but his fundamental nature could not be altered.

  He had not been created in Golna. The dialect in which he spoke, full of rolled R’s and elongated vowels, was not common in the city. Its speakers, the people of Nos Ulom, had long been banned from Dareth Hlum. The nations were old enemies. Whereas Dareth Hlum took great pride in its religious neutrality, allowing any sect to proselytize and even battle in the street if properly registered, Nos Ulom took equal pride in its conservative Adrashism, the expression of which the government closely monitored.

  Dareth Hlum considered Nos Ulom a nation of dangerous extremists.

  Oddly, if this had not been the case, Berun would never have been allowed into Dareth Hlum.

  Before achieving fame for fighting in the city, he had achieved notoriety in Nos Ulom for assassinating Patr Macassel, High Pontiff of Dolin. The man, arguably the most powerful religious figure on the continent, was killed in his sleep, skull crushed beyond recognition by hands twice as large as a normal man’s.

  Berun had not bothered to destroy the elder eyes that had been set into the rafters above Macassel’s bedroom. As dictated by custom, court mages blinded a slave and implanted the elder eyes so that they could be read, after which the manhunt officially began. For twelve days, the royal mount followed the constructed man through the pinefields of southern Nos Ulom. On the morning of the thirteenth, Berun slipped across the border to Casta, leaving forty-two men dead and many more injured behind him.

  The government of Nos Ulom tried its best to cover up the story, claiming Macassel had died of natural causes. They never offered an ounce of bone or skin in bounty for Berun’s body.

  Their clumsy efforts of obfuscation failed, and Berun became a hero to the various Anadrashi factions of the continent. Adding insult to injury, Nos Ulom’s Royal Redcoats failed to stop locals from burning the home of Ortur Omali, Berun’s creator and the nation’s most powerful mage. Nothing of value was found in the rubble, and few believed the official story that Omali had died in the conflagration.

  Of course, these events overjoyed the governors of Dareth Hlum. When word reached them that Berun was living in Casta’s capitol, they sent him an invitation to a tournament in Golna, hoping the constructed man would choose to stay. The fact that Berun himself symbolized a sort of religious extremism was inconsequential. The governors wanted him for the sole purpose of aggravating Nos Ulom.

  Their efforts at seduction failed. Berun proved uninterested in creature comforts and money. Fortunately for the governors, Golna had one thing that interested the construct: fighting. He had fought in Casta, where nearly everything was legal, but had not approved of the gambling houses, establishments run by men who thought nothing of pitting a man against a lion if there was a profit to be made. If a man wanted to risk his life, Berun reasoned, he should at least be given a chance.

  Violence and camaraderie compelled Berun, not money. He found himself allying with the Black Suits of the Seventeenth, though he had never found reason to hate God as they did. His affection for his new brothers and sisters grew. Their passion inspired his respect. He refused to engage in their violent arguments of faith, but he would defend their abbey and fight alongside them in tournament.

  The transaction was simple. He lived on the roof of a Black Suit abbey, home of the Seventeenth Order, and protected his adopted fami
ly. He gave his tournament winnings to the abbey master, Nhamed, who then filtered the funds through to the community. In return, Butchertown loved Berun.

  Gradually, the White Suits moved out entirely. During the eight years Berun had called the Vunni neighborhood home, the majority of Adrashi had defected to the Black Suits due to his association with them—this, and the White Suits had never gained much of a foothold among the violently Anadrashi Vunni population anyway.

  If holding a position of influence bothered Berun, he gave no outward sign, but at rare times he wondered if his convictions were not in fact his own. He wondered if he had been programmed by his creator to act this way or that, tipping the balance in the Anadrashi’s favor, just as he had been forced to kill Patr Macassel. At his most paranoid, Berun worried he had been created as a weapon to strike at Adrash, precipitating the great cataclysm all Adrashi men claimed would come about if the Anadrashi triumphed.

  From time to time he became lost in visions. He who did not sleep relived the murder of Patr Macassel as though it were a dream, brass fingers tight around a throat that turned to white stone, crumbling in his hands.

  The episodes had become more frequent of late, repeating a message he could not comprehend.

  ‡

  The street wavered before his eyes, signaling the beginning of yet another vision. Possessing no means to stop it, he relaxed and let the sensations overtake him.

  Immediately, it was not as he had come to expect. He did not wake in the hallway before Macassel’s bedroom door.

  He possessed control over his limbs.

  He was not alone.

  A mage with hands of burnished steel walked with him through the forest named Menard, a vast pine slope north of the Aspa Mountains. He knew the location well, though the trees in his vision had grown into elder-figures: Tall, impossibly thin men of purple, lustrous wood instead of flesh—demigods cursed with a thousand arms, elongated skulls, and eyes growing like berries on their fingers. Branch-tips brushed against him like insect antennae, trying to insert themselves into the crevices between the spheres that made up his immense body.

  He lumbered clumsily, as if he had not drank from the sun in weeks.

  The mage talked at his side, meaning lost in riddles and bad jokes, gesturing with his hands. When he rubbed his fingers together, they sounded like singing bowls. When he clapped his hands, they tolled like bells. Though Berun recognized the mage, he could not place or name him.

  It seemed they walked with a purpose, but the reason for this too escaped his grasp. He spent a great deal of time avoiding branches. He found himself grateful for the mage’s constant talk. If silence descended upon them, other voices took up the slack. Quiet at first, they became louder and louder until the components of Berun’s body vibrated together uncomfortably.

  “Pay attention,” the mage said at some point. “You are about to receive instructions.” The message came with clarity in the middle of an otherwise unintelligible rant, as if the man had woken from a dream to deliver it.

  Berun resolved to remember the words.

  In time they came to a great manor house of blackwood and stone. They arrived without warning, without a break in the forest. He recalled entering no glade, yet the building stood in the center of a treeless expanse. Though its angular facades were dark, the structure seemed to glow under the moon.

  Turning to the mage, his thousands joints creaked like a carriage’s rusty leaf spring.

  “Has it always been night?” he asked. His deep brass voice sounded as if it came from the other side of a wall.

  His stare was met with eyes the color of wet soil.

  “It will be,” the mage said, and began walking toward the house.

  Berun had seen the structure before. Something about it set the spheres deep inside him spinning, jerking like animals in a packed cage. He did not want to follow the mage, but a look back revealed that the elder trees had closed ranks, denying him any path of return.

  ‡

  The manor house’s immense blackwood door leaned forward in its frame, stretching above Berun’s head. The stoop felt slick under his feet, as if the stone were coated in ice. He fought to keep his balance.

  The mage looked up at him expectantly.

  Berun struggled for a time, falling and rising and falling again. When his knees hit the stone, they rang like iron nails struck with a hammer. He tried scoring the stone itself for purchase, but the landing proved as hard as diamond. Finally, he braced himself as best he could and punched the door. His right fist and part of his forearm exploded into their composite metal spheres, showering him, falling on the stoop like marbles from a child’s bag.

  The door creaked open.

  “It is polite to knock,” the mage said, stepping into the dark foyer.

  Berun concentrated, but the spheres would not return. Strangely, this did not bother him overmuch. He examined his shattered right arm in wonder, attempting to move phantom fingers. He watched the simulated lines of sinew in his forearm, marveling at the way the broken rows of tiny spheres still moved in a detailed imitation of muscular contraction.

  The mage turned to the open doorway and mumbled something. His steel hands glowed softly in the darkness, beckoning. He stepped backward, and for a brief moment light flared in his face: two pinpoints of amber fire in each eye socket.

  “I’m coming,” Berun said. He stepped into the house, and the light failed completely. He turned to find the door closed. Or perhaps it was still open and someone had stolen the moon and stars. Gradually, he discovered that not every source of illumination had been extinguished. Not quite. A bluish glow ringed his vision. He considered this, confused.

  Just as the realization struck, the mage spoke: “We see by the light of our eyes.”

  The double pinpoints of the mage’s eyes returned, positioned before Berun, though he could not tell how close. Cautiously, he stepped forward. Solid, flat ground beneath his feet. The amber lights neither receded nor grew closer, and so he kept moving toward them. Much as he had experienced in the forest of elder trees, time lost all meaning.

  Eventually radiance began to seep back into the world. He now walked down a hallway. The mage advanced several paces before him, the hem of his dark cloak brushing the purple, thickly carpeted floor. Stylized elder trees stretched from the floor, arching above them on the ceiling. As they walked, Berun thought the images became even more like elders. They took on definition until they appeared ready to step out of the walls.

  The hallway was long. It did not slope upward, yet Berun found he needed to lean forward slightly in order to reach the nondescript doorway at its end.

  The mage looked up at him expectantly. Berun knocked.

  The door opened easily and the hallway disappeared. The sun hung in a cloudless sky. Berun and the mage stood on a vast field of short yellow grass sparsely blanketed with blooming azure flowers. Before them, the horizon was flat and somewhat close. Berun swiveled his head to look behind and found the same view. To either side, however, the horizon seemed to draw to a point a great distance away. It seemed they stood on the top of an immense wall.

  He looked down. At his feet a fat man slept, dressed all in white. As with the mage, Berun recognized but could not place him.

  “Kill him,” the mage said. His eyes had become large, liquid pools of amber in which two doubled irises swam. Two figure eights lying on their sides.

  “Why?” Berun asked. Without consciously deciding to do so, he knelt before the sleeping man and reached for his neck. He had not thought of his shattered right arm in some time, and the sight of it surprised him.

  “One hand should be enough, Berun,” the mage said.

  Hearing his name spoken broke the spell. The artifice of the vision sloughed off like a layer of dust, and Berun became aware of his body on the rooftop in Butchertown. He knew the heat of the sun there, a very real sensation that split his worlds in two. All at once, the link between waking life and vision felt very tenu
ous. Berun regarded the body of Patr Macassel, then stood and turned to the mage.

  “Father,” he said. “Where am I?”

  The mage Ortur Omali smiled. Deep within Berun’s chest a sphere knocked against its neighbors.

  “Wrong question,” Omali said. “You should ask, ‘Where am I to go?’”

  Berun stared at his creator. The man had aged.

  Realization struck. “You’re really you,” Berun said.

  Omali’s smile broadened. “Inconsequential. Ask me where you’re supposed to go, Berun.”

  Confused, full of questions, Berun nonetheless obliged.

  “Danoor,” Omali said.

  “Why?”

  Omali inclined his head to the man at Berun’s feet. Macassel had disappeared, replaced by a tall, strongly built man. He wore a black elder-skin suit, but its surface shifted on him like oil, revealing patches of skin that varied from light to dark. One moment, the pink paleness of an Ulomi miner. Next, the rich oilwood brown of a Knosi fisherman. He grew. He shrunk. Twice, his suit took on the hue of milk and his skin turned black.

  Berun looked up. The great mage’s form blinked on and off. For a moment, his entire body appeared out of focus. An intense frown of concentration scored deep lines in his face. He caught Berun’s questioning look.

  “I cannot quite find the focus now, but he is here somewhere. He does not invite others in. Perhaps—” His steel hand shook as it rose to his mouth and pried his lips apart. He yawned as if the muscles of his jaw were sore. “Ah. I have found him again. For all his resistance, he is nearly as open as you are, Berun. His alignment is unclear, however. I cannot yet make a decision about him. Soon, though. Soon. But that does not concern you. Your mission is simple: You will watch him, and await my command.”