No Return

by Zachary Jernigan

  Finally, darkness descended on his mind, complete and total immersion. He slept soundly.

  “Do you hear me, Vedas?” someone said.

  Vedas opened his eyes. A slow, luxurious process, letting light into his skull. It spread from there, suffusing his whole body, centering in his stomach and genitals. A warm tingling, similar to but infinitely better than blood rushing into a numb limb. Though he had experienced the effect of a spell wearing off before, this proved to be a different sensation entirely.

  He smiled. The muscles of his face were sore, but it felt good nonetheless. He lifted a hand to his chest and exhaled with relief. They had not removed his suit. As reality crept back, he enjoyed the texture of smooth fabric and muscle underneath his fingers. His hand drifted over the ridges of his stomach and paused.

  An erection pushed almost painfully against the fabric of his suit.

  A polite cough. “Can you hear me, citizen Tezul?”

  Vedas’s head swiveled to regard the doctor. His hand fell to his side. “Yes, I can.”

  “Good.” The doctor pressed fingertips against Vedas’s chest, ribs, and stomach. “I think you can stand now, but not too quickly. You’re still weak.”

  Berun walked into view. “Here,” the constructed man said, offering Vedas two fingers to hold onto. Vedas gripped them and rose on rubbery legs. His bowels felt loose. Everything hurt. Running fingers over the wiry stubble on his head, he found that even his scalp was tender. Now that the novelty of the world had begun to leach away, the light in the room was too intense, the noise from outside a painful racket.

  “We’re still in Nbena, I assume,” he said. “How long have we been here?”

  “Just one night,” Berun responded. He looked over Vedas’s head at the doctor. “Do you have instructions? Medicines to give him?”

  The doctor shrugged. “He’s not dead, so the spell worked. He’s cured. I’d recommend at least one night’s rest before continuing your journey, plenty of water, and food. The pain is mostly muscular tension, which will fade in time. If you want to buy more sedative spells, I’ll gladly sell them, but they aren’t good for him.”

  Berun shook his head. “No. He’ll deal with the pain.”

  ‡

  The town simply called itself Nbena. Its citizens on both sides of Dalan Fele wore metal badges, which allowed their free movement from one nation to the other. Apart from the Autumnal Wars, the last of which had occurred three centuries previously, Dareth Hlum and Casta enjoyed a congenial relationship. Dareth Hlum looked upon Casta as a younger, less civilized version of itself, while Casta considered Dareth Hlum amusingly tidy and idealistic.

  The different personalities were reflected in Nbena’s layout. On Dareth Hlum’s side, the streets formed a grid. They were wide and clean, and the evenly spaced clay buildings that lined them were unpainted. Quietness and sobriety ruled. Even the stunted oaks appeared at regular intervals. On the Castan side, roads existed where foot and barrow wheel needed them to be. They were uniformly dirty. Once-brightly painted buildings leaned over alleyways and crumbled cheap bricks onto the street. Loudness and gaiety ruled.

  The doctor had recommended an Anadrashi tavern on the Castan side named Brickchurch. Unlike its neighbors, it had been carved into the sheer stone facade of Dalan Fele itself. To Vedas, raised believing in the wall’s impregnability, this seemed almost sacrilegious.

  Standing before the tavern’s doorway, he swayed as a brief spell of dizziness nearly overtook him. Black motes swam at the corners of his eyes and an odd pressure built in his ears.

  Berun’s fist closed around his bicep. “Steady. You have to eat. Come on.” He led Vedas into the tavern’s dim interior, where the air was cool and still and smelled of stone. Eyes followed the pair as they navigated the furniture and sat at a rear corner table.

  Vedas leaned forward on his forearms, fighting the urge to drop his throbbing head onto them. “This isn’t pleasant.”

  Berun grunted. “What do you want?”

  “To go back to sleep,” Vedas answered immediately. “I’m hungry but I don’t feel like eating, which is a first.” He licked chapped lips and reconsidered. “I suppose I could eat, but before that I need a pitcher of water. Plain, no lemon or mintgrass, and I’ll pay the extra for ice. Then I’ll eat whatever they have in the kitchen. I’m not picky.”

  Berun walked to the bar and ordered. Vedas watched him through halfclosed lids, feeling a vague sense of unease. You won’t let him die, the constructed man had said—but why had he said it? They were nothing more than traveling companions. Such concern made Vedas uncomfortable. He liked uncomplicated relationships, and disliked owing favors.

  “Excuse me.”

  Vedas’s eyes snapped open. Only a handful of seconds had passed, yet a woman now stood before him, short sword naked on her left hip. By the look of her corded arms and shoulders, she knew how to use it. Vedas shifted his hips slightly and inched his right hand over the table’s edge for leverage. It would not be a graceful move if he were forced to defend himself. The slightest tensing of muscle in his legs and back stung sharply.

  The woman’s pale eyes held his. “Your name is Tezul, right? Vedas?” She spoke with a slight Onsi accent. Her voice was deep but not unfeminine.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And your companion? He’s the construct Berun, right?”

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  She shifted her weight in an odd fashion, as if she had suddenly become uncomfortable. She gestured to the chair across from him. He nodded and she sat, crossing her legs to the side. For a moment he fought the temptation, and then glanced quickly down. Her calves and thighs were well formed, muscular, freckled and hatched with scars. The tattoo of a sea serpent wound around her right ankle. She brushed short brown hair from her forehead and yawned, revealing a gap between her two front teeth.

  Berun arrived, index finger hooked around the handle of a pitcher. The woman turned to stare up at him.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “What is that?” she asked, nodding at the pitcher.

  “Water. With ice.”

  She made a sour face. “My name is Churls. Churls Casta Jons. I have a proposition for you.”

  BERUN

  THE 17th OF THE MONTH OF SOLDIERS TO

  THE 2nd OF THE MONTH OF CLERGYMEN, 12499 MD

  THE BADLANDS, NATION OF CASTA

  The air grew sharper as they ascended into the badlands. Berun noticed it as a minute change in the sound of his spheres rubbing together, while Vedas experienced nosebleeds.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Churls told him.

  “Nosebleeds?” Vedas asked without a trace of humor.

  She started to laugh and caught herself. “No. No, I meant the air. You’ll get used to the air.” She stared at her feet, opening and closing her mouth as though considering her next words carefully. None followed, however. Eventually: “It’s even drier than I thought it would be,” Vedas said.

  “They do call it the badlands,” she answered.

  He frowned. “I didn’t make the connection.”

  She shrugged. “That’s... understandable.”

  Berun watched his companions carefully. He could see the thing between them, but not as if either yet recognized it. Their conversations were infrequent and stilted, though both kept at it. Churls and Vedas reminded Berun of certain individuals in the Seventeenth—men and women who, despite forming attachments, could not succeed in forming lasting bonds. The pressures of living and fighting together overwhelmed them.

  Berun had never understood human sexuality. Then again, he had not given it much thought. He watched his companions because it interested him, but he himself had no intention of assisting. If Vedas and Churls desired awkwardness, they had it. If they desired more, they would need to broach the subject themselves.

  The first day wore on with Dalan Fele straddling the horizon at their backs. The nearly treeless ground, red like pitting iron, stretched before th
em. Some geological process had tipped the floor of the world ever so slightly, and before long Berun ceased to notice they trod an upward slope. To either side barren, saw-edged hills rose, flanking them in straight lines.

  “We walk on the bed of the river Zaos,” Churls explained. “It stopped flowing long before the birth of man, in the age of the elder.”

  She walked easily, eyes watchful. She squinted ahead and shadowed her brow to stare into the sky. Berun wondered what she was looking for. He had not spotted a ground animal since they started, and the only birds rode the air so far above them they looked like specks. Golna had scavenger birds, too. They were not dangerous as far as Berun knew.

  His curiosity finally got the best of him, and he pointed these things out to Churls.

  “Those aren’t birds,” she answered. “It’s a trick of perspective. A wyrm could carry a man away in one claw, and probably tear even you apart. Fortunately, they come down only every once in a while. Adrash willing, it won’t be today.” She spat twice, an automatic warding gesture Berun recognized. “I’m being so watchful because there are animals that live below our feet. Earthmovers. They crest about as often as wyrms touch ground. If one does, it’s best to recognize the signs early.”

  “They’re dangerous?” Berun asked.

  Churls shook her head. “Not at all. But wyrms are, and they love earthmover meat. They don’t like men much, either, so I plan on being far away from one if it lands.”

  Berun turned to Vedas. “Have you heard of this?”

  Vedas grunted. Though he had started the day in good form, hours of exertion had taken their toll. His face was flushed and his breath wheezed from him. Still, he pushed himself, maintaining a quick pace on stiff legs, only stopping to eat or drink. Even when coughing fits doubled him over, he kept moving.

  Again, Berun offered to carry his pack.

  “Quit asking,” Vedas said. “I’ll get better by walking, not resting.”

  Berun shrugged, by now inured to the man’s stubborn pride. Vedas would walk himself to death rather than admit weakness.

  Churls, on the other hand, had gladly accepted Berun’s help. Instead of dividing the ungainly packs between the travelers, she let him carry the huge bundle of firewood and the eight two-gallon bladders of water. She had watched in fascination as he drew the cords of the luggage into his back, so that they appeared to grow out of his metal flesh. The extra two hundred pounds bothered him not at all.

  When darkness fell, shutting off the light as though someone had blown out a candle, they simply stopped walking and set up camp. Churls dropped her pack with an audible sigh and unrolled her wool-and-down sleeping bag. Vedas lifted the firewood and water from Berun’s back and then watched as Berun punched a fire pit in the ground.

  “Will that attract earthmovers?” Vedas asked Churls.

  She shook her head. “Back when their magics were good, the badlanders used to try and raise the animals to the surface in order to hunt wyrms, but nothing they did worked. I doubt they never tried pounding on the ground.”

  Berun could only sense texture and vibration, not temperature. He surmised that it must be quite cold, however, for Churls sat as close to the fire as she safely could. The muscles of her jaw jumped as she chewed her gammon. Vedas, forearms crossed loosely on his knees, stared into the fire and occasionally allowed a glance in her direction.

  Berun regarded one, then the other, wondering who would break the silence.

  “You aren’t cold?” Churls asked Vedas. She kept her eyes on the ground and spoke quietly, obviously more ill at ease now that night had fallen—now that she and Vedas were so close. It fascinated Berun.

  “No,” Vedas said. “My suit keeps me warm.”

  “Cool, too?”

  He nodded. “It keeps me comfortable. Within limits.”

  “It makes you stronger and faster, right?”

  “A bit.”

  “I’ve seen suited men before, of course, but never up close. The White and Black orders are less common in Casta and Stol than in Dareth Hlum, and those you see are almost always fully covered.” She looked up. “You can make it move, can’t you?”

  Though he nearly always wore the skin-tight hood, Vedas had not yet covered his face in her presence. He smiled and the edges of the hood drew in around his features. In the shifting firelight, it looked like an illusion.

  Churls’s eyes widened. “When I was a child, vendors sometimes displayed elder-cloth at the fabric markets in Onsa. They don’t let you touch.”

  She leaned toward him, hand out. “Can I?”

  Berun saw Vedas’s right hand tighten around his left forearm. The man nodded. Churls ran her fingertips over his shoulder, and then pressed her palm flat. In the firelight his suit took on the sheen of volcanic glass, and her hand stopped moving. It lay there, rooted to him, a part of him. The moment stuck, and Berun felt a faint vibration inside himself: the nearly imperceptible shudder of a spinning sphere deep within his chest. For an instant, it seemed that a hooded figure stood behind Vedas, hand raised in the air. Poised to strike. The gleam of silver metal.

  The moment broke, and Churls’s hand dropped. She stood to ready her bedroll, and Vedas met Berun’s gaze across the fire.

  “What are you looking at?” Vedas asked.

  ‡

  Gradually, the earth became brittle. It cracked in tiny wavelets around their feet. The slope of the ground leveled out and the wind picked up. These subtle changes trickled into Berun’s mind, as did the fact that another traveler had not come upon them since leaving Nbena.

  Churls took out her compass more and more often. Berun let her, though he knew they had been traveling south in a straight line for two days. According to his internal map, they were currently some twenty-five miles from Dalan Fele, roughly the same distance from the southern coast of Casta. Staying the course, they would reach the ocean in another day. The ruins of the stone bridge that had once linked Was Anul to the mainland were visible from this shore, men claimed. On a clear day, the smoldering crown of the island itself could be viewed.

  While the possibility of seeing these sights enticed Berun, he could not understand why Churls had chosen this route. Even the deserts of Toma held life, but the coast between Dalan Fele and the Steps of Stol was rumored to be barren, waterless. Already, the foliage had petered out to the occasional thorny jess tree. The clouds, too high to form rain, formed an impenetrable grey roof over their heads.

  Vedas gave no sign he recognized anything out of the ordinary. Not surprising, Berun thought. The man was a city creature, and even a competent tracker could lose his sense of direction with the sun buried in the clouds.

  Berun considered the situation. He would let Churls lead without comment for another day. Surely, she did not intend to continue southward toward the Steps. Undoubtedly, she had a reason for diverting them. Perhaps she meant to avoid bandits or some other danger. He trusted her, in fact enjoyed her company. Aside from her awkwardness with Vedas, she projected a confident and easygoing nature.

  The same could not be said of Vedas, a man who continually aroused Berun’s ire. It was not the Black Suit’s arrogance, taciturn manner, or sullen moods—Berun had encountered such things before, even in the best of men. No, the source of the antipathy lay deep within, as though it had been stamped upon every sphere of Berun’s being. He found himself looking for new reasons to dislike the man. He fought the urge constantly, but achieved little headway.

  It was not difficult to imagine the source of this manipulation. The illusion of the hooded figure the night before had proved it. Berun regretted the fact that Omali chose coercion over communication. He could not help wondering if his father had judged Vedas inaccurately.

  He feared what he might be forced to do to the man.

  Father , Berun broadcast. What danger can Vedas possibly be to you? Speak to me.

  Less than twenty miles from the coast, they set up camp as they had the previous night. The ground crackled under t
hem as they settled around the fire. Vedas—tired but visibly healthier than the day before—watched Churls prepare a soup of dried potatoes, vegetable stock, and salted mutton. She used a travel pot with a locking lid, so as to not waste water.

  “May I hold your sword?” he asked.

  “Sure.” She turned on the balls of her feet, drew her short, dull blade and flipped it, offering it to him hilt first.

  Vedas ran his fingers over the pitted steel but did not bother testing its edge. He stood and walked a few paces away, rolling his shoulders.

  Stepping through several forms, his strokes were fluid and economical. Berun knew from conversation that barehanded and staff technique comprised the majority of the man’s training, but it clearly had not ignored bladed weapons altogether. While he was not a master of the short sword, Vedas was by no measure incompetent.

  “Not bad,” Churls said after several minutes. “But you’re treating it like a sword.”

  Vedas looked from the blade to her face, and back again. “I won’t deny that.”

  She stood. “You miss my meaning. Any fool can see my blade has no bite.” She held her hand out. “I stole my first sword from a dead infantrymen. My brother wouldn’t let me run in his gang with people who knew how to hold or care for it properly, so I had to teach myself. I imagined every tree and fence post was an enemy, and hacked away.”

  The weapon came to life in her hands. Each attack was a steel blur punctuated by a moment of complete stillness, the end product of her viciously quick parries and thrusts. A crushing blow to the temple. A sideswipe aimed to crack ribs. A vicious upswing into the groin. With the weight of the blade behind it, her blows would likely pulverize even the thickest bones.