No Return

by Zachary Jernigan

  “Does he know who you are?” she asked.

  Fyra shrugged. Maybe. He’s not as smart as you. He’s like a little boy. She looked up until Churls met her stare. You don’t want him to tell Vedas about me, but I don’t think he will. He hasn’t even told you about me, and he tells you everything. I think I’m his one secret. Everybody’s got at least one—except Vedas, maybe. He can’t keep a secret. You’ve got lots, though. Isn’t it funny, how everybody shares except you?

  A muscle jumped in Churls’s jaw. “Is this why you wanted to talk, to tell me I don’t share?”

  Yes. But there’s more. I want to help. Some of the others do, too.

  “Others?” Gooseflesh rose on Churls’s arms and neck. “You mean the dead.”

  I only said some. Fyra shook her head sadly. Some of them are angry about Vedas’s speech, but most of them don’t care. They say it doesn’t matter what happens to the living now. They tell me to shut up. But the ones who still have people they care about don’t think like that. They don’t want to see the world destroyed. It’s good to have a home, even if you leave someday and never come back.

  “You would fight Adrash? What can you do?”

  Fyra managed to look insulted. We can make people stronger, like I did for you and Berun. We can see inside anything and make it better. I’m good at it. I can show others.

  “Won’t Adrash see? What if that’s the thing that sets him off?”

  That’s why some people tell me to shut up. They think I’ll attract too much attention and get everybody in trouble. Fyra curled her lip. They’re cowards. What can Adrash do to us? He never even noticed us. And we’ll do it in secret. We’ll make everybody stronger, but we won’t make it a show. Still, we can’t do anything if you won’t let us.

  Churls almost laughed, but the horror of this statement stopped her cold. It all depended on her say-so? A war against Adrash, the awakening of an army of the dead, up to her alone? She could not make that decision now. She might never be able to make that decision.

  She struggled to form an adequate response. She did not want Fyra to misinterpret her intentions. To her surprise, she also found she did not want to hurt her daughter’s feelings—or close off the possibility of help entirely.

  “I’m not even sure I want to fight, Fyra. I’m not sure I believe in this war. Give me some time to think.”

  You’re lying. Fyra’s expression conveyed what she thought of liars. You’ll follow Vedas wherever he goes because you love him.

  Churls did not bother to deny this. Love did not solve the problem. It never had.

  “I can’t tell the dead what to do, Fyra. You’ll have to decide for yourselves.”

  You have to do it. The others aren’t special like me. They won’t break the rules like I do. They want a living person to tell them. They picked you. You just have to talk to Vedas first. He will help you. Promise me you’ll talk to him, and don’t lie to me like you did before.

  Too tired to argue anymore, Churls nodded. She would not pretend there was any other way. Events had proceeded far beyond the realm of her understanding. Vedas needed to know. Not because he possessed any more intelligence or knowledge than she, but because she needed someone to share the burden with her.

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  One more thing. Fyra held out her hand.

  Churls took it. It was no more substantial than air, of course, but she could no longer claim to feel nothing at Fyra’s touch. Warmth flowed upward from her wrist, suffusing her body like smoke filling a room.

  She stepped onto the flats, and the wind did not bite or suck the moisture from her skin.

  I want you to look at the stars with me, Fyra said.

  They lay on the parched earth, connected at the hands.

  Tell me about her. The way you did when I was little.

  Churls recalled with perfect clarity. She had buried the memories, but had never truly forgotten. On clear summer nights, sometimes she and Fyra had slept on the roof of Churls’s house. Listening to the sound of waves crashing against the rocks below, she made up stories for her daughter’s amusement— stories of gods and goddesses waging war across the void, giant ships sailing the oceans of other worlds, and kingdoms spreading their fingers toward the ends of creation.

  Now and then, she told the story of a little girl who jumped from star to star, trying to find her way home. Aryf. It took Fyra years to realize the girl’s name was her own spelled backwards.

  Do you remember, Mama? Fyra asked.

  “Yes,” Churls answered. “Yes, sweetie, I do.”

  She blinked, and the tears spilled over. She had not expected them to come, but they came nonetheless.

  ‡

  Vedas stood in the center of the room, staring down at the graven image of Adrash. He had removed his hood, and held his left fist at the base of his neck. Slowly, he inserted a finger between suit and skin and tugged, stretching the elder-cloth ever so slightly. He did not look up when she walked in, though he could not have failed to see her.

  Exhaustion loosened her tongue. “How long has it been, Vedas?” He opened his mouth, took a deep breath and exhaled before speaking. “Twenty years. More than half my life.” His eyes roved around the room, landing everywhere but on her before returning to the floor. “It’s odd, but I never used to think of it as odd. I haven’t felt sun or water on my skin for two decades. I haven’t touched anything or anyone in that time.”

  This was an exaggeration, Churls thought—surely. Someone, an instructor or a friend, had run their naked fingers through his hair or patted his cheek, offering comfort. Someone had kissed him, an innocent overture between adolescents. He had not abstained from sex completely. He had taken lovers before suffering whatever wound crippled him.

  She would be a fool to take his words literally, yet the images failed to resolve in her mind. She could not imagine him receiving or giving affection to anyone.

  The man she had grown to love did not dissolve where he stood. He was still the same man. Rather, she realized how greatly her desire blinded her to the reality Fyra had known all along: Vedas spoke the truth. He had not touched another soul in twenty years. He had kept the world at bay with a thin fabric shield.

  And yet, surely the suit was inconsequential. With or without it, he would not know how to comfort a crying child or hold the hand of a sick friend. He did not know how to kiss or make love.

  Churls considered this, and her desire remained.

  “I want to touch you,” she said.

  He did not move except to tighten his fist around the fabric at his neck.

  Heart pounding at her foolishness, she took two steps toward him. The room was not large. If she took six or seven more steps, she would be standing before him.

  “I want to touch you, Vedas. Will you let me?”

  Slowly, he unclenched his fist and spread the open hand upon his chest. He still did not look at her, and when he spoke he did so clearly, forming each word carefully, as though he did not want her to misunderstand.

  “I have pictured touching you, Churls. I have pictured taking off my suit and making love to you, but you should know that I cannot do it all at once. It won’t...” He shook his head. “It will not be like it is in my head.”

  She smiled and took another two steps. “I know that, Vedas.”

  He swallowed, and ventured a glance at her face. She noticed for the first time how deep the wrinkles around his eyes had become, how sharp his cheekbones. His lips trembled in the pauses between sentences.

  “It is not just my inexperience that makes this difficult. It is the fear of changing into someone I do not know. Perhaps I have already gone too far by disobeying Abse. Maybe I am no longer a Black Suit already. If I love someone outside the order, reason says that I cannot remain in the order. If I choose to do this now, I will be a man without a home.”

  His eyes found hers and finally lingered. His hand strayed near the collar of his suit again.

  “Churl
s. You have to understand this above all else. There is no return from this decision.”

  “No return,” she agreed, crossing the space between them. “I understand that.”

  EPILOGUE

  The battle with the outbound mage had left Adrash physically drained, a state he had not experienced in many millennia. He needed time to recover before gathering the spheres.

  Secrets had been stolen from his mind. A new god had announced himself. The corners of Adrash’s mouth curved upward. He closed his eyes, but despite his exhaustion could not still his thoughts. A renewed lucidity had come upon him, as though the encounter with Pol Tanz et Som had lifted a veil from before his eyes. He floated above the surface of the moon and let his mind drift through thirty thousand years of being Jeroun’s god, alighting here and there on an event, examining it for its potential. Memories that had become indistinct over the centuries now opened for him, unfolding in his mind with such dizzying, ecstatic clarity that ghosts breathed, extinct species lumbered across plains, and crumbled cities rose from the ocean.

  He longed for the heat and chaos of battle, and then he longed for sensual delights. He caused his vision to become a combination of both, displacing events so that they flowed seamlessly into one another. The culminating moments of the Battle of Keyowas led to the orgy he had hosted in Knos Min to celebrate his adopted son Iha’s coronation. The feast of Nwd’al’Kalah, where he had eaten his first tinpan fruit and battled his first hybrid wyrm, resulted in the destruction of The Seven Cities of Omandeias. With a memory as vast as Adrash’s, the permutations were nearly endless. He added flourishes, changing faces, identities, and geographies on a whim. He acted out the parts of hero and villain, or simply observed as events transpired, powerless as any man.

  Regardless of these alterations, the exercise soon became mundane, for he could not stop the cycle of history from repeating itself. The names and places changed, but the patterns stayed the same. The rekindling of his memory served only to drive this truth home.

  After all, how many variations could be expressed in arrogance, deception, and greed? How many in faith and honor?

  He alone could answer these questions, for he had been with mankind from its origin—had witnessed every one of its faltering steps.

  In the beginning, he had found the divine armor. Assisted by its strength, he cracked men from their hundred iron eggs. He taught them the use of tools, and then watched from afar as they huddled miserably around cooking fires. Mankind was naive then, unprepared to inherit the earth. Too used to the comforts of their eggs, the reality of survival nearly destroyed them. They adapted, of course, through hardship. They became strong, became worthy of his notice. Yet with time, their concerns shifted from the preservation of their species to the deception of a business partner, the conquest of a neighbor’s husband or wife. They returned, ever and ever, to the source of ease, to laziness and avarice and self-destruction. Though all traces of their true nature and history were soon lost, they could not resist becoming what they had once been.

  The world was theirs. It always had been.

  Men were not evil, Adrash knew. They were simply lazy and opportunistic, courageous and virtuous in very infrequent bursts.

  He searched now for those moments of courage and virtue. He delved into his mind and summoned the best of humanity, reliving the moments wherein men had proved their worth. During the siege of Shantnahs, he watched Neaas Wetheron rouse her army to defend the jeweled city. Her voice carried like a bell from atop the mile-high tower she called home. He felt himself swayed by her speech, as indeed he had been twenty-two thousand years ago—but this time he switched sides to turn the battle in Wetheron’s favor.

  During the destruction of Grass, he watched the valiant efforts of its people to find shelter from the volcano’s toxic surge of gas and rock. Not just for themselves, but for their neighbors. As he recalled, he had let the city burn, for its people had turned their backs on him. Now, he placed himself in the path of destruction, turned it away like a man brushing lint from his sleeve. No, it did not satisfy even a little to do this, for the past could not be changed. Nonetheless, he did it, as if to affirm that he would not make the same decision a second time.

  Other memories he did not change. Sometimes failure was in itself a form of victory: the act of having tried. He conjured up the original city of Zanzi—a shining ornament of suspended walkways and crystal towers built by magicians only seven generations removed from their egg—and tried to save it once more. His power had just been a small thing in that primordial time, when vast herds of fire dragons still roamed the continent. While he fought one of their number, the people of the Golden City ventured from cellars into the streets, dragging bodies to safety even as the many-legged beast crushed their glass homes and dripped acid onto their bodies. Adrash watched them die. He tried to pull hope from their futile acts of charity.

  It was insufficient, and his brittle hope in mankind faltered yet again.

  At times his faith had failed completely, and on these occasions he had dredged material from the far side of the moon to build another sphere, another weapon. Try as he might, he could not forgive the men of Jeroun their pettiness, their squabbling, their ridiculous and violent worship.

  But he could not condemn them completely. Not yet. There were signs. Still, small thoughts that needed pushing, encouraging. Selfless acts gone unnoticed by the rest of the world.

  Sometimes, Adrash imagined he heard the whisper of a familiar voice.

  The call of a soul that resounded even in the void. A threat and a temptation.

  A catalyst.

  ‡

  With the renewed clarity of recollection the battle with the outbound mage had gifted to him, understanding dawned upon Adrash.

  He had been a fool to doubt the existence of prophets. He had imagined nothing: No seers had been conjured from the dust of his mind in order to forestall another cataclysm. True, time and isolation had dulled his ears to the sound of the singular voice in which such men and women spoke, but he should not have allowed himself to believe it never existed.

  The memory of Eloue, the first to assume the voice of a prophet, bloomed within him.

  He had been young, a god for a mere two thousand years. Haughty yet capricious in his hungers, he neither sought nor turned away those who would worship him. He visited Knoori and the thousand island-homes of man that rose out of the shallow sea, besting creatures and performing miracles. Reveling in his power and the thrill of physical conquest, the blood hot in his veins, he found love easily.

  After spending a bracingly crisp autumn on Herouca, the lush, sugar maple-covered island that would in time become known as Little Osa, he chartered a yacht cruise around Doec Lake to celebrate the arrival of winter. He discovered the woman alone, leaning far out over the deck railing, staring into the deep luminescent waters, half of which were covered by a shelf of rock—all that remained of an immense cave system the elders had carved into the side of Mount Lepsa, king of the Coriel Range.

  He admired her beauty in shadow and light. Soon thereafter he became her lover.

  Her name meant “white stone” in a language only Adrash remembered. She lived in the Old Quarter of Tiama, and made her living by way of deception. While a small portion of enchanted blood moved within her, allowing her to read thoughts as easily as normal men read books, healthy minds bored her. Thus, she rarely told her customers the things they needed to hear. Instead, she used her unique skill to obtain power, make money, and amuse herself. She seduced men with her lies and charm, and then took delight in breaking them.

  Her eyes were polished amethysts. She rarely smiled. Hairless skin the color of peach-flesh stretched over the muscle and fat of her body in flawless curves. It felt to his lips like orchid petals. When she became excited, a fine sheen of liquid formed on her lower stomach and thighs, and dripped from her womanhood. It tasted to him sometimes like cantaloupe, sometimes like coconut. Though her beauty was clearly a condi
tion brought about through magic, Adrash could not stop himself from worshipping at her altar.

  A most alluring pretense arose between them, eventually bound them together. She knew who he was, but treated him as she would any suitor, and he lavished upon her all the appearances of love. They traded lies, and by doing so found what they both needed. She insisted she did not enjoy sex, but he thought otherwise. She told him she coveted his power, and he knew she did not always lie.

  “How did you acquire this?” she asked as they lay tangled together on the bower above the Gason-a’Loran street market. Her fingertips brushed across the line on his left wrist where the white material of his armor met black skin. Every now and then he felt her nails, as if she were trying to get under a seam, though she knew full well no seam existed. Many had tried to take the armor—which he frequently wore as a glove when not fully sheathed within it—from him, only to discover it could not be removed by any means.

  He groaned, but not without pleasure. He had told her the story on many occasions. It went the same way each time, for the lie was old and worn. The enemies of which he spoke had never existed, nor had the cities and countries he named.

  “That evening on Pergossas I led the men in a successful charge, halting the chimera advance line. We lost three hundred men and, weak from blood loss and starving, likely would have lost a great deal more if the enemy had not retreated to the hills outside Nusse, leaving their dead and dying for us. Chimera meat is dreadful, but it is better than dying from hunger.”

  Playfully, he dug his fingertips into her taut belly. She did not move an inch, and he smiled into her shoulder. Every time they moved even slightly, flowers rustled beneath them. Though winter’s chill had not yet left the earth, his ebon skin absorbed the sun’s heat and radiated it like a furnace, keeping her warm.