No Return (14 page)

“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 them 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.

She stopped as suddenly as she started, and sheathed her sword. “I called my technique The Dull Sword. Quite creative, don’t you think? Not surprisingly, I’m the sole practitioner of the art. It’s not the beautiful thing fencing is.”

Vedas shook his head. “I’ve never seen anyone use a sword that way,” he said, voice soft with admiration. He turned away, coughing into his fist.

Churls dropped her head. Seeing further into the spectrums of light than a man, Berun saw the flush of her cheeks and drew his own features into a smile, a demon mask above the fire.

Vedas had finally done something charming.

‡

Berun scooped handfuls of dry dirt and snuffed out the fire. He brushed the char away from the larger pieces of wood, revealing the unburnt flesh underneath, and set them near the bundle to cool. This task finished, he soon became restless. Just as he had done the first night out, he cautiously began constructing sculptures out of the firewood. He moved slowly, as quietly as a snake whispering through grass.

Vedas and Churls did not stir, and so he proceeded to the next step, mirroring each sculpture by rearranging the spheres of his body—a slow, painstaking process. The arrangements became more complex as the night wore on, until finally he achieved his goal: a break in the link, so that one group of spheres no longer touched the other. As he broke the magnetic bonds of his being, an intense feeling of pleasure passed through him. His mind blinked rapidly on and off, each instant of existence mounting upon the other until he felt on the verge of decohering completely, scattering on the ground like droplets of mercury.

Creating sculptures and mirroring their shape had been his habit from the moment he woke in his father’s foundry. Quite possibly, his father had instilled the urge in him out of compassion. Berun could not sleep or obtain sexual release, and so the sculpting occupied his mind and kept his vital energies from stagnation. He was, despite his mechanical composition, a being who had inherited a man’s spirit, a man’s needs.

On rare occasions, instead of sensual release he experienced a hallucination, the details of which never varied. His mind drifted of its own accord and rose above the world as it shrunk slowly below him, ripping open along a seam on its far side and spreading like a blanket under his feet. He counted the multitude of islands speckling the surface of the ocean. He lost himself in contemplation of the permanently spinning storm that lay on the other side of the world, sure that if he stared long enough the clouds would part, revealing what lay beneath.

Sustaining this vision for long was an immense effort. Something always drew him away. His father, no doubt, confounding his creation for arcane reasons once more.

Berun’s curiosity burned intensely, yet there was little cure for it. The world was a known quantity, and had been for millennia. Several large landmasses lay just off the coast of Knoori, many of which bore the signs of ancient inhabitation by the elders. The remains of bridges, avenues that had once linked to the mainland, lay crumbled underwater. Beyond the islands stretched the ocean, breached here and there by tiny spurs of rock never meant to support life. The outbound mages of Stol had captured this image of Jeroun from orbit—a hundred times, a thousand. Reproductions had made their way across the continent long ago.

An unending storm across the ocean? Madness.

Tonight, Berun began to feel the call of the vision early on. It lay just under the surface of his consciousness, almost frightening in its potency. He felt as if he might fall forward, crack through the thin crust of earth at his feet and never stop falling. For the first time in his life, he fought to stay grounded in waking reality. He struggled to reconnect the two halves of his being, and failed. The towering buildings he had erected to mimic the sculpture trembled as wave after wave of dizziness crashed upon him. A voice spoke from the heart of the wooden city. The ground shook with its volume, drowning out the words.

Atop a tower of bronze spheres, Berun swiveled one searing blue eye, searching for his companions.

They were gone, as were their supplies. No indentation in the ground where Churls or Vedas had lain, no sign of the fire. Instead, before him spread the complete map of Jeroun, intricately drawn in the loose dirt. Danoor glowed like a molten glass bead, and a line of fire extended from it to Berun. On the other side of the world, the perpetual storm glowed as if an island of magma were being born under its cover. The Needle blazed in the sky above, stretching from horizon to horizon, closer and more radiant than the moon itself.

Berun looked down again to see an invisible finger tracing a figure in the dirt: a man with no features except for eyes and two small horns sprouting from his forehead.

“Father!” he bellowed. “Father, what is this?”

The unintelligible rumbling voice cut off abruptly, and the wooden city drew itself off the ground. Rustling, splitting and cracking, it formed the cloaked shape of Ortur Omali.

Affection swelled inside Berun so rapidly that he immediately questioned its authenticity. Without knowingly intending to do so, he rose and took on his familiar shape. He held Churls’s sword, a ridiculously small weapon in his outsized right fist. A toothpick.

The mouth under the cloak smiled, a wicked arrangement of wood slivers. “What is this! What is this!” his father echoed. “A possibility. A potentiality. The Black Suit could be a snake, could be an eagle. Could be a worm, could be a leech. One thing is sure: he is the man to watch.”

“Vedas,” Berun said. “He’s only a fighter.”

“Appearances only. Is God a man?” Ortur Omali stretched elaborately, creaking like a dead tree in the wind. His fingertips were splinters, long and stiletto thin. Two pinpoints of light flared in each eye. “There is something odd about him, child. Something troubling, or possibly even encouraging. It is tough to tell the difference, sometimes. I may need him destroyed. You must avoid attachment.”

“Why? How will you decide?” Berun had so many questions, yet his mind struggled through the confused logic of dream. His brows knitted in frustration. He brought his fist up and discovered that he could not open his hand to drop the sword.

“I don’t need this to kill a man,” he said. They were not the words he had intended to say.

The great mage laughed: the rustle of fallen leaves. “It is not a weapon, Berun. It is a demonstration.”

The air wavered before Berun. It became a curtain of shifting darkness behind which the figure of his father shuddered and fell apart. The sound of twigs snapping came to Berun distantly, and the earth shuddered beneath him. A crack formed in the map drawn on the ground. A rent opened, its crumbling edge racing toward Berun. He tried to pick up his feet, but found them rooted in place.

He tipped sideways into the black chasm.

Abruptly, the vision ended.

Berun stood over Vedas’s sleeping form. Churls curled in her sleeping bag a few feet to his left. Her sword belt lay on the ground next to her, empty.

The weapon was weightless in Berun’s hand.

‡

They continued south in a straight line. The air grew colder, the wind stronger. Powerful gusts kicked up fine salt crystals embedded in the thin soil and flung them against exposed skin. Vedas covered his face. During the heaviest gusts he walked half blind, the suit material grown to cover his eyes. Churls pulled leather chaps and jacket from her pack and wrapped her head with the scarf she used as a pillow. Berun barely felt the wind or the abrading sand, but the going was slow for the other two.

They stopped just before the sun set. Instead of pounding down a fire pit, Berun concentrated to form a pick at the end of his arms and then tore a shallow depression in the hard-packed earth. He lined the windward side with excavated rocks to shield Churls and Vedas from the wind, which became even more ferocious after dark, ushered in from the ocean that lay only a handful of miles away.

It was time to broach the subject of Churls’s route.

“Why aren’t we headed west?” he asked after his companions had finished dinner.

Vedas looked up from the fire, turned his head to regard Churls.

She shifted, obviously uncomfortable. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to talk about it.” She sighed in response to Berun and Vedas’s silence. “Really, I thought it was obvious. I thought maybe you’d seen the error in your plan.”

“What error?” Vedas asked. “Why would we travel south?”

“Because of you,” she said. Her eyebrows rose suggestively. “Don’t you get it?”

“Me?” He frowned. “Are you mad?”

She sighed again. “Would you consent to travel with a cloak? Wear it at all times?”

Berun had discerned her meaning, but remained unconvinced. Before Vedas could answer, he spoke. “Casta is neutral and Stol is moderate Adrashi. There’s no reason for Vedas to cover his suit.”

Churls laughed. “Oh, yeah? Then I must be misinformed. I’ve waylaid us unnecessarily and I apologize.” Her smile disappeared. “There are three tribes living in southern Casta. The Aumarveda, the Quinum, and the Lor, all three of which are devoutly Adrashi. They wouldn’t hesitate to attack a heathen like Vedas. Fortunately for us, they do not venture near the ocean. Who would if they could avoid it?

“As for the moderate Adrashi of Stol, in general I’ve found them far less accepting to foreigners—Anadrashi foreigners in particular—than eastern lore has it. Even if Vedas is not attacked outright, he’ll be a target for thieves and men eager for a fight in every hamlet. Added to this, Ulomi immigrants are common to the central valleys of Stol. Someone would undoubtedly recognize you, Berun. And unlike Casta, Stol is a land of magic users. Even you could get hurt. In all cases, a confrontation would hold us back. Our best option is to travel the Steps, where by all accounts the populous is sparse and peaceable, more concerned with living than fighting about religion.”