No Return

by Zachary Jernigan

  Vedas said nothing. Another scream sounded.

  Berun shrugged.

  Churls scowled. “I can’t listen to that and just stand here. Can you?” They ran. Berun jogged beside them, huge feet drumming on the hard ground. Whoever had screamed would certainly hear them coming, if he or she were still alive.

  Vedas did not question why he had agreed to go along. He ran, and for a moment forgot his troubles. He had lost weight while traveling, and it seemed like his feet barely touched the ground. Running felt very good, in fact, like punching through an opponent’s guard.

  “I can see something ahead,” Berun said. “Figures, three or four. Not very large, running. They look human.”

  “Can’t be sure of that.” Churls drew her sword and held it by the blade, near the hilt for better balance. “Are they moving away from us?”

  “No. They’re crossing our path, maybe one hundred yards ahead. There’s a fourth, definitely, smaller than the others. It’s running from them, not far ahead. One of the three following her runs on four legs and is continually jerked back, as if it’s on a leash. Sometimes it stands on its hind legs and runs like a man. It howls like a dog.”

  Vedas concentrated, and caught the sound. “I hear it, too,” Churls said.

  “Magic or witch-lore,” Vedas said. He imagined the fear the pursued child must feel, knowing what followed at his or her heels. “Leave it to me.”

  Berun’s eyes flared. “We haven’t decided which side we’re on.”

  “I have a feeling,” Vedas said. “I’ve been on both sides of the hunt. Good men don’t draw out the pursuit like this.” He pushed his legs harder, propelled forward by a visceral sense of justice. “I’ll take all wagers.”

  Churls grunted. “For once, I’ll go with the odds.”

  Vedas leaned forward into the night, legs as firm as iron underneath him. The hood of his suit tickled over his forehead and cheeks, slid like a lover’s caress over his lips. He bared his teeth within the mask. The blood raced in his veins. The smell of his own sweat mingled with the elder-cloth, and it was the smell of home.

  ‡

  They closed the distance. When they were a hundred feet away, the hunters released their howling creature and turned to meet them. Vedas saw that the pursuers were indeed men, squat and strongly thewed. Both carried heavy pickaxes in meaty fists, and waited in ready postures. Vedas looked beyond them as the fourth figure fell under the creature’s body, and aimed in this direction. As he passed the two men, light erupted from their bodies. They glowed as if they had been turned to molten metal.

  Shit , Vedas thought. He knew enough of magic to recognize it for what it was: alchemical armor. During a battle in Plastertown, a White Suit using a similar spell had fought off seven Black Suits by himself.

  “Hold them if you can!” Vedas yelled to Berun and Churls. “I’ll take the beast!”

  He jumped. His right shoulder hit the creature’s upper back and his arms whipped around its chest, carrying the body clear of the child’s. He tightened his grip as they slid on the hard-packed soil, allowing the creature no opportunity to regain its feet. It howled, turning its head with blinding speed to snap at his face. The sour rot of its breath struck him like a blow, and its chomping teeth rang an odd metallic sound. It bucked and spasmed under him, but he held fast, pushing its belly into the ground, splaying its arms and legs under his bulk.

  In full control now, Vedas put one hand against the back of the creature’s head and savagely slammed its face into the ground. He straddled its waist, unmindful of the claws raking along his thighs and buttocks. The suit hardened in defense so that he barely felt the contact, yet the frenzied movements fueled the rage screaming in his limbs. He slid forward, positioning both kneecaps on the creature’s upper arms, just below its shoulders. His hips rose into the air, shifting the full weight of his body onto his knees.

  The bones gave way with satisfying snaps, and the creature howled. Vedas put both hands on its skull, twisting it back and forth, grinding the creature’s face into the unyielding earth.

  “Don’t. Fucking. Touch her!” he spat through clenched teeth. The blood beat red waves of pressure behind his eyes.

  A high-pitched whine reached his ears. He pushed harder to quiet the sound.

  “Basuz!” a voice boomed.

  “Stop!” another said almost simultaneously—a voice Vedas barely recognized in his fury. A giant hand closed around his torso and lifted him into the air. Iron-hard fingers flowed under his arms and pried them open, forcing him to drop the mewling creature. Somewhere in the back of Vedas’s mind, he knew Berun held him, yet he thrashed wildly in the constructed man’s grip, roaring like a man possessed.

  The single, ragged note held and then fell into silence. He stopped flailing and held his body still, fists clenched, every muscle rigidly defined on his shuddering frame. After a handful of seconds, his chin dropped onto his chest and his body sagged in Berun’s gigantic fingers. His jaw throbbed.

  “The child?” he said. “She’s okay?”

  A hand slapped his face lightly, and then lifted his chin. Vedas focused on Churls’s face.

  “Who are you talking about?” she asked.

  “The girl they attacked.” Vedas located the two dwarfish men, whose bodies still radiated a warm orange light. He met one’s eyes, and the look they returned shocked him. Horror. Fear etched the man’s rough features, and he made a warding sign in Vedas’s direction, left fist held to forehead and then thrown forward. Adrashi, obviously.

  Vedas looked at Churls again. “Where is she?”

  She shook her head, eyes locked on his. “Vedas, there is no girl. What we do have are two miners, their slave, and a thief.”

  ‡

  Powerful muscle shifted under the slave’s hairless skin. He growled menacingly, yet somehow managed to look pathetic. The “creature” Vedas had fought was obviously a man, despite the changes sorcery had wracked upon his body. His lower jaw had been elongated so that it hooked under his nose, cheeks cut so that his mouth could open wider. Saw-edged ridges of metal lined his lipless maw. Limping upright, his broken arms hung uselessly at his sides. He turned on his leash, revealing the scars where his sex had once been.

  Now that Vedas saw the man, he pondered how he could have so mistook him for a beast.

  It had not been his only blunder.

  Indeed, the thief was no girl. Standing a bit above Churls’s waistline, the woman’s face was a map of wrinkles. Clearly, she did not view Vedas as any kind of savior, for she stood behind her captors as they talked to Berun. She stared at Vedas, expressionless, but he imagined a challenge in the way she held his gaze.

  Berun let Vedas down, and told him to unmask himself—to show that he was a man, not a demon. The constructed man explained that, before he and Churls had engaged in the fight, one of the miners had pointed to the fourth and yelled, “Thief!” Berun had understood the Ulomi word immediately, and surmised their identities.

  “These are Baleshuuk men,” he explained to Vedas. “Corpse miners.”

  Despite himself, Vedas breathed in sharply.

  Churls nodded at his astonishment. “If I wasn’t staring at them, I wouldn’t have believed it either. No matter who told me.” She shook her head and spoke in a softer voice. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but somehow they aren’t it.”

  Too stunned to agree or disagree, Vedas simply grunted. His mother had told him tales of the Baleshuuk, the near-mythical suppliers of elder corpses. She described them as impossibly thin like the elders themselves, yet he had heard others describe them as thick or egg-shaped, not men at all. Though few if any of the tale-tellers had ever seen one, the existence of the Baleshuuk could not be denied, as the world continued to receive a steady—though ever more expensive—supply of bonedust and other elder materials. Nos Ulom had become rich by exporting these hard, dwarfish mountain men to Stol and Knos Min, the world’s most elder-rich nations.

  According to legend, t
he Baleshuuk extracted elder corpses from solid rock as easily as midwives coaxed newborns from their mothers’ wombs. It was said the miners used magic like ordinary men used forks and spoons. Vedas stared at their pickaxes and wondered.

  “How can we make this right?” Berun asked.

  Vedas struggled to catch the miners’ response. They spoke in a thick Ulomi dialect, full of rolled R’s and long vowels. Every word Vedas caught—one out of every two or three—seemed a syllable too long. Only superficially similar to Berun’s dialect, the Baleshuuk’s speech contained numerous alien words that confounded even the constructed man. He shook his immense head, furrowing the shelves of his brows in confusion.

  Vedas did not need a translation to read the miners’ expressions, however.

  “They’re very angry,” Berun finally confirmed. “They’re threatening to return with a full company of their brethren. I’ve tied to explain our mistake, but they don’t seem to understand. She is a thief, they keep telling me. It’s their right to punish her as they see fit.”

  “I agree,” Churls said. “Can we pay them off?”

  The taller of the two miners spoke up.

  “‘You ruined our slave,’” Berun translated. “‘He is worth four ounces.’”

  “Shit,” Churls said. “We don’t have that much to give. Do we have anything else of value?”

  A sound came from within Berun’s body, as of glass clinking. He reached down and plucked a handful of objects from his thigh. He lumbered forward and bent, presenting them to the miners. Vedas recognized them even from a distance. A collection of spells, the largest of which was a tiny porcelain jar sealed with wax.

  “Where did he get those?” Churls whispered.

  “A witch attacked us on a pass between the Sawbuck Mesas. I told him not to take her spells, but he did it anyway.”

  The shorter miner took the spells. He held them up to his ear and recited seven words slowly. Names. He handed six of the spells to his companion, who stored them in a pack hanging from his belt. The stoppered jar remained in the short one’s hand. He examined it from every angle before closing his eyes and sniffing its seal.

  Suddenly, he grinned. “Yesh,” he said. “Yesh. Okee.”

  The two miners conferred briefly, and then the taller one spoke to Berun. The constructed man’s hand engulfed the smiling miner’s, a ritual of agreement Vedas recognized from his time at the river docks in Fishertown.

  “They’ve agreed to part ways peacefully,” Berun said.

  Frowning, Churls said, “They seem happy.”

  Vedas watched the two miners, faces nearly split with grins. Berun had given away something extremely valuable, apparently.

  A tight feeling spread outward from Vedas’s chest, observing their cheer. They were still going to kill the thief, he knew. And why should they do otherwise? An old woman with no use? Surely, few would miss her around the cooking fires, the laundry buckets.

  Yet he recalled how fast she had run from the howling slave. The way she stared at him even now, unafraid. She had never cursed him with a gesture. He tried to compare her to anyone he had known in his life, and came up empty. A tiny old Baleshuuk woman. Not Churls, nor a little girl with a black sash tied around her arm. Not the drunk he had helped push from the Physickers’ Bridge when he was only nine years old.

  “We’ve overpaid them,” he told Berun. “Tell them to spare the thief.”

  BERUN

  THE 14th TO 21st OF THE MONTH OF PILOTS, 12499 MD

  THE APUSHT VALES TO THE CITY OF BITSAN, KINGDOM OF STOL

  They made their way northwest toward Lake Ten under the cover of night, avoiding any sign of man. Churls, the least likely member of the party to elicit an aggressive response from the Adrashi men of the Apusht, walked point over the more exposed ground. Berun caused his eyes to revolve around his head, constantly vigilant.

  They kept a lookout not only for Adrashi. Raiding parties of Tomen were not uncommon this close to the border. Fiercely independent, the people of the desert nation considered organized religion an abomination, and proselytizing to foreigners a waste of energy. Anadrashi and members of other sects had been known to buy their freedom on occasion, but Berun, Churls and Vedas possessed only enough bonedust to reach Danoor.

  During the first night’s travel, Vedas kept his eyes fixed westward. “It’s hard for me to fully conceive,” he said. “I’ve bought wares in Querus for years. Two of my brothers are expatriated Tomen. I know their reputation, of course. Even in Golna, they cause violence from time to time. Still, Followers of Man—people who should be my brothers- and sisters-in-arms—an entire nation living with such hatred toward its neighbors!”

  Churls grunted. “I’ve never been to Golna, but I know many who have. You know what struck them about the city? During the day, they could walk anywhere without fear. Watchmen were posted to every street, and they didn’t appear to be extorting anything from anyone. Don’t assume the rest of the world is like home, Vedas. In fact, I recommend you take the worst of what you’ve heard about other people and assume it’s the truth.”

  “I’d prefer not to form that habit.”

  “Preference has nothing to do with it. You treat people like they have your best interest in mind, and nine times out of ten you get stabbed.” She forced a smile. “Look, I appreciate that you don’t like looking at people as suspects, but goodwill only extends so far.”

  He breathed deeply, visibly suppressing the urge to defend himself, to contradict her words. In the end, he simply nodded.

  The act of restraint impressed Berun. Talking about Julit Umeda, the encounter with the Baleshuuk and their slave—the events had changed Vedas in a way the constructed man did not yet understand. The end result, however, was clear: Berun’s automatic hostility toward Vedas had dissolved, replaced by a genuine affection for the man’s unyielding awkwardness, and Churls no longer carried herself as if she expected a battle.

  They pressed on through the hard, folded land. The farther they traveled from the Steps, the harsher the territory became. Winds blew westward through the valleys constantly, striking the hardscrabble earth and whistling through Berun as though he were a dried sponge. The components of his body rasped together shrilly. When he examined his innermost spheres and found them to be caked with layers of dirt, he began cycling them through his body constantly in order to keep clean. When they found water, he washed too.

  Anything unrooted to the ground was carried into the dust-streaked sky. It became quite cold, far colder than Casta. Churls suffered the worst. She took a woolen jacket from her pack, removed her skirt, and pulled on tight brown leathers that hugged her hips and buttocks. Vedas took to falling behind so that he could watch her walk. The man fought to hide his attraction, but his eyes gave him away.

  For her part, Churls showed no sign of noticing the attention. Doubtlessly, she did. She was, Berun knew, the subtler of the two by far.

  The minor drama amused Berun.

  He needed amusing. They all did. The Apusht was taking its toll, physically and emotionally.

  By the third night, the wind had become more than a nuisance—it had become a frightening adversary. It hid their enemies behind sheets of dust. At times it seemed capable of carrying them into the sky. Around small, smokeless campfires, Vedas and Churls rarely spoke of their goal. They talked as if it had been abandoned. Berun marveled at the human propensity for gloom, which he suspected had infected him as well.

  Increasingly, he sensed the presence of his father. Ortur Omali’s spirit stalked him across the land, spying, influencing him in ways he could not yet comprehend. The memory of standing over Vedas’s sleeping form with Churls’s blade in his fist haunted him, causing him to wonder if he would be able to resist Omali’s direct command. Though he longed to convince his father of the Black Suit’s goodness, he did not desire another confrontation, another demonstration.

  Best to avoid it for as long as possible, he reasoned, and muster what strength he could.
Every day while his companions slept, he strived to keep his mind from drifting and becoming vulnerable to his father’s will. It grew noticeably easier to focus the longer he maintained his manlike form. The more he reigned in his urge to transform, the more rooted he was to the world. As a result, he no longer built structures with his body or split himself in two.

  Like a flesh and blood man, he longed for release. The temptation to give in was strong, but he resisted, found ways to distract himself.

  The most effective distraction had long since become an obsession. While tracking the travelers’ progress across the highest Step on the map he kept superimposed over his vision, he had made a discovery. By concentrating upon a region it would expand and focus, lending him a bird’s eye view of the landscape.

  During the daylit hours, he found his attention drawn away from the local surroundings to the limits of the known world—to the ocean and its myriad islands. The continent of Knoori held many interesting sights, surely, but he longed to see places unknown to man. In an effort to comprehend the true scope of the world he had only dimly beheld in vision, he pushed at the boundaries of his map. The progress here proved slow, but the effort satisfied him, like a fight well fought but ultimately called a tie.

  Beyond the satisfaction exploring the map provided him, four times now he had been able to spot groups of men whose path they would soon cross. It was difficult to locate such individuals under the cover of night, but his skills improved day by day.

  Though he could not fathom why, he endeavored to keep his newfound ability a secret. He lied to his companions. I saw a scout. I heard them approaching.

  Churls was not fooled. For four days she had listened to his explanations without comment, and then: “Tell me what you’re seeing right now, Berun.”

  Caught off guard, he shrugged as though her question confused him.

  She smirked. “I’m not an idiot, and you’re an awful liar. You couldn’t have seen the Tomen raiders yesterday from our position, and this wind makes hearing anything softer than an earthquake impossible. Out with it.”