No Return (17 page)

Like all articles of clothing composed of elder skin, the voidsuit developed a strong telepathic bond with its wearer. Ebn knew its condition at all times. With enough concentration, she could make it come to her. It lumbered like an ill-made construct, but it would power through enemies and walls in order to reach her. On an autumn afternoon in 12457, she had collapsed on the floor of the gymnasium, muscles unresponsive, the victim of a usurper’s poisoning. Before the solution dragged her under completely, she summoned her suit.

It had carried her to safety, saved her life.

Though she knew it was not technically sentient, Ebn had never been able to stop herself from cooing to hers as she worked. Painting a sigil was an act of intimacy, a rare occasion to remove her gloves and let her tongues taste the air. They strained out of her palms, an oddly pleasurable sensation akin to stretching the tightness out of one’s wrist, trying to lap at the paint as if they possessed minds of their own. By the time she finished painting, her hands were pleasurably sore from gripping the brush and keeping her tongues in check.

Her self-control all but spent, before capping the paint jar Ebn usually allowed her tongues to taste a tiny bit of paint. She dipped the straining tip of each organ into the thick brown fluid. The vague taste of iron and loam seemed to linger in her nose as her quivering tongues retracted into her palms. Bright motes, daylight stars, swam before her eyes. Her wrists twitched and she clenched her fists against the faint stirrings of nausea that preceded the euphoria.

She waited.

Though prepared for it, the wave always caught her by surprise. It lifted her off her feet and swept her away. Adrift in blackness, the sun nonetheless seemed to shine upon her. The same heat bathed her skin, invigorating her. She moved her arms as if she were swimming, though she had never before swum and never desired to. She opened her mouth and the heat entered her body, tasting of lemon and rose and marrow. Time stopped and she swam.

She would wake hours later, encased in her voidsuit, arms and legs sore from the unaccustomed exercise.

Today, she painted a sigil of influence—a simple, almost elementary character designed to increase its wearer’s persuasive faculty. Her tongues remained oddly quiescent during the process, only venturing forth from her palms briefly to taste the air.

Sigil completed, she sewed twelve spells of compulsion into the joints where the suit’s armored plates met at underarm and groin. Hopefully, for all of their jealous watching, not one of her lieutenants would notice the slight alteration. Certainly, they would wonder why she had painted what seemed such a simple sigil on her suit, and conjecture among themselves.

Only Qon knew the full extent of her plan. The spells would increase the sigil of influence’s power, allowing Ebn to draw the god’s attention and amplify the mages’ message of goodwill—to seduce him into looking kindly upon them, in effect. A risky maneuver, surely, yet she believed it would work. She had diagrammed and re-diagrammed the spell’s thaumatic output, proving its grace and subtlety.

She wondered what Pol’s reaction to the plan would have been. Approval, possibly. Certainly, it was a more aggressive approach than she had ever espoused before.

She and Pol were not yet lovers as she had planned. In truth, her mind balked at the thought of using the spells of compulsion—the sex spells, as Qon had crassly labeled them—on him. But for the twelve she had incorporated into her suit, she kept them in the jar in her office, away from view. Maybe she had overthought the whole process of seduction, which should be quite simple in theory. Always in theory.

Slip them under his door
, a voice urged.
Act!

She imagined calling him with her mind, followed by his arrival at her doorstep. Undressing each other. His body under hers. Afterwards, the feeling of his long torso against her back, his lips brushing her shoulders.

The spells she had created were flawless. She examined them daily. They would bend him to her will entirely.

Banishing these thoughts, she returned her suit to its table. Before capping the jar of alchemical paint, she held her right hand over it. The tongue refused to emerge from her palm. She tried the left hand, to the same result. A good thing, perhaps. The aftereffects of tasting the paint were mildly disorienting, and she needed to keep her mind sharp for the evening’s ascension. Possibly, the tongues had picked up on her restive mood and responded with a rare show of empathy. Their lasciviousness had limits, she knew. They were a part of her. They understood fear easily enough.

Ebn had good reason for fear. She had failed to seduce the god once already.

‡

Of course, history proved that many before her had been equally incautious. Even those whose statues now lined the Avenue of Saints had been fools in their own right—murderers, rapists, manipulators, acting in the name of Adrash. The world celebrated men and women of violent conviction, but ultimately the actions of such individuals had driven the god from the earth. Read with a discerning eye, the story of the world was one of brutishness, impetuosity, and spite.

The creation of the Royal Outbound Mages of Stol had been no exception. A common assumption was that the corps had been created in order to commune with Adrash, to coax him back to earth, but the truth was far less noble.

Three thousand years prior to Ebn’s era, the king of Stol received word that the Republic of Knos Min had begun sending eldermen into orbit. A massive espionage effort produced no evidence to support this claim, yet the king could not very well risk being shown up by Knos Min, his nation’s primary rival in the elder corpse market.

In 9209 MD, several hundred years after catching wind of the original rumor, the Academy of Applied Magics sent its first elderman into orbit. This mage promptly died of exposure to the void. The academy, urged on by the queen herself, did not stop at this one death, but persisted and eventually developed magics sufficient to the task of lifting an elderman into low orbit and landing her safely thereafter.

Stol did not attempt to keep its advanced program a secret. The newly titled Royal Outbound Mages became a symbol of the kingdom’s magical development, and the mages themselves became figureheads of a new class. Eldermen, hardier and more prone to magical talent, soon came from all regions of Knoori seeking employment.

At its height, the corps numbered over eight hundred individuals. Inevitably, not all who applied were accepted into the ranks, yet Stol never failed to exploit an asset No one knew how many eldermen perished as a result of experimental procedures tangential to the program.

Despite the kingdom’s vast expenditure of resources, as time wore on the program failed to produce anything of actual or perceived value. A small but growing minority viewed the outbound mages’ efforts—which at that time consisted largely of monitoring Adrash’s movements—as blasphemous, asserting that no man had the right to enter the god’s abode. By the opening of the ninety-fourth century, public support of the mages had eroded almost completely. Eldermen, so recently a beloved symbol of Stol, had become a suspect race, a source of anger and targets of violent reprisal.

By imperial order, the bloated program was cut to a fraction of its former size in 9365.

Oddly, this act proved foundational in energizing the corps. Reduced to a lean nucleus of fifty highly skilled eldermen, the mages reinvented themselves, purging their lore of any unnecessary ritual or tradition. With fewer resources, no longer under the eye of public scrutiny, they developed their own odd society. They restricted themselves to the academy grounds almost exclusively, fearful of a public who feared their race.

With their combined genius and magical talent, they developed and refined the voidsuit, a tool that increased each mage’s magical capability fivefold. Reaching orbit in record times, they flew farther and farther away from Jeroun, even to the point of entering the moon’s insubstantial atmosphere. They became fast and strong, and ultimately forced their way—through murder, deception, and magical coercion—back into ruling positions in the academy.

The majority of the mages had long since ceased to believe rumors of a competing outbound army in Knos Min, and redefined the program’s mission. Convincing Adrash of the world’s worth became the only goal. Over time, this became the academy’s encompassing objective as well. Entire branches of magical inquiry were abandoned, faculty dismissed or executed for heterodox views.

In the span of a few generations, one question came to dominate all academic discussion:
Does Adrash love the peaceful, or does he love the strong?
Undoubtedly, the question had been asked many times, in churches and on street corners for millennia, but the development of advanced magics that allowed an outbound mage to travel to the moon—into Adrash’s territory— made the issue less a matter of metaphysics than concrete reality.

How
, the mages submitted,
can we approach Adrash without offending him?
The debate went on for many years, but by the time Ebn bon Mari rose to the rank of Captain of the Royal Outbound Mages her predecessors had generally come to the same verdict: Adrash did not look kindly upon acts of aggression.

Of course, they possessed damning evidence to support this conclusion. The creation of the Needle itself seemed to have been spurred by a particularly violent display of the corps’ strength in 10991. Seven hundred years later, the mage Dor wa Dol—driven mad by the sigils he had tattooed on his body with alchemical ink—had attacked Adrash, causing the god to send his two smallest weapons to earth, resulting in a decades-long winter. The Cataclysm.

These tragedies
, Ebn’s forebears determined,
are the result of our arrogance. We must not treat Adrash as if he were an equal met on the battlefield. Instead, we will beg his forgiveness. We will prostrate ourselves, offering gifts and tribute.

Ebn had inherited this outlook: despite her own monstrous gaffe, she believed in it wholeheartedly.

‡

After breakfast, a knock on her door. Ebn hurried to the balcony curtains and drew them shut. The weighted hems whispered across the polished flagstones, shutting out the sun completely.

Four of the sculptor’s apprentices brought the statue into her apartment. Though each strapping human lad wore a worksuit of high-grade eldercloth, they struggled under the weight of marble. Two strained at its head while the other two swiveled its torso, angling its massive shoulders through the doorframe.

“Could we get some light?” one asked.

“Shut up,” Ebn said. “You measured everything yesterday. Your eyes will adjust.”

The apprentices maneuvered the statue to the exact center of her living room and set it upright. Even in the near dark it was beautiful, but it was not yet the effect she desired. Without taking her eyes from the figure, she pointed to the curtains.

“Open them,” she told no one in particular. “And when you do it, do it quickly. I want the sun to burst into the room, not crawl.”

One of the apprentices shrugged and hauled on the golden rope. Light filled the room instantly, blinding Ebn for a heartbeat. The blackness fled from her eyes and the statue came into swift focus, as though the figure had materialized into her room out of nothingness.

The breath caught in her throat.

Adrash stood before her, head nearly touching the eighteen-foot ceiling. He stood relaxed, back straight and feet slightly apart. Carved from a single immense block of unveined white marble, the swells and depressions of his musculature appeared as smooth as polished glass, buffed to a high shine with several hundred grams of bonedust.

The armor had retreated from his head and neck, revealing his stylized masculine features and smooth scalp. Traditionally, sculptors used a black stone to show the true color of the god’s naked skin, but Ebn preferred the purity of white alone.

His eyes were closed, his lips slightly puckered to kiss the globe cradled in his powerful hands. Though she could not see the detail from where she stood, Ebn knew the god’s lips landed on Stol. She had designed it to symbolize Adrash’s love for the world, but also to suggest the kingdom’s centrality. For the last month she had spent far too much of her time quibbling over sketches and miniatures with the sculptor.

The chest must be just so. The genitals, just so. His thighs are too small, his head too large
. She obsessed over the globe, even. The islands were too numerous or too uniformly shaped, the perpetual storm on the other side of the world spun the wrong direction. The sculptor, not to mention the entire arts faculty, must have thought her batty.

No matter. The statue was completed, and it was beautiful. Her time and the academy’s funds had been well spent.

“Ebn?” Qon called from the open doorway. She stepped in. “I have been knocking for some time. I...” She stared up at the statue. “Good Lord Adrash. Ebn, I had no idea how beautiful it would be.”

Ebn tore her gaze away. “I think I am insulted. What did you think I was doing with my time—carving a mantle-piece? Adrash needs nothing of any practical value, true, but he does deserve to be venerated properly.” She could not contain her smile as she turned back to her creation. “Only now I cannot bear the thought of letting it go.”

‡

Dustglass helmets cradled in the crooks of their elbows, forty-two outbound mages stood on the roof of the Esoteric Arts building. They were accoutered for a long orbital excursion, bandoliers filled with spells. Ebn noticed more than a few fresh sigils—blue and grey and red—painted on voidsuits, and approved.

A strong breeze had carried the smell of the docks, wet and rotting. Qon pulled a kerchief from her suit collar and covered her mouth, unconcerned if the younger outbound mages interpreted this as a sign of weakness. Though the smell made Ebn nauseous too, she stood stone-faced among her officers as the statue was hauled and deposited upright in their midst.

They were ready.

The moon had not yet risen, but the Needle already stretched nearly halfway across the sky. Positioned in the exact center of the roof, the marble god seemed to glow with its own inner light. Several of the older mages faced it and pressed left fist to forehead out of reverence. The younger lot stole glances at the statue, affecting airs of disdain. They could not ignore the existence of Adrash, but deference did not fit in well with the affected cynicism in vogue among the academy’s young elite.