No Return (2 page)

Well into her hundredth year in the valley, the night sky had been just stars and moon. Later, one object appeared. Then two. Eventually they extended like a bead necklace nearly a fifth of the length of the sky, smallest to largest leading to the moon, twenty-nine in all. They seemed to pull the moon across the sky, led by some invisibly massive draft animal.

Over the next five hundred years they had moved slowly to form a diamond pattern, then a cross. For a while they had floated around the moon, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther from its surface, and then they trailed it across the length of the sky. For a long time, the woman thought they had disappeared completely, until she saw the edge of one peeking out from behind the moon.

In her seven hundredth year in the valley, the two smallest spheres had fallen to the earth. The woman recalled it dimly, the fiery streaks as the objects hit the atmosphere. They arrowed in opposite directions, and so she had tracked one as it sped westward over the horizon. She waited for something to happen, and when it did not she turned to the east and witnessed a great flash of light. Hours later, the ground shook. The following day a blanket of rainless clouds rolled in, almost touching the spires of the jagged summits ringing the valley.

It grew much colder for several years, which affected the people of the valley not at all. The woman felt some sadness that she could no longer watch the sky, but she had still been young enough then to take comfort in the closeness of her children. When the clouds lifted, the objects were scattered across the night sky so that not all could be viewed at once. Over the course of a decade, they moved back toward the moon, finally taking on their original, straight arrangement.

As the brains shrunk in their skulls, the people of the valley drifted apart. The woman circled the edge of the lake alone, drinking its hallucinogenic waters regularly until the greater part of her consciousness lifted free of her body. In time her children forgot that she was their mother, and she pushed them away when they approached her. A low growl lodged deep in her chest.

Now and then even the taste of skin and bone grew sour in her mouth.

She did not put a name to it, but she thought often of dying. She watched the sky and hoped to see the objects falling, their beautiful trails of fire dissecting the sky into a giant wheel. She had no religion, no memory of Adrash, the god the other men of the world worshipped, but still it was a form of prayer—a silent, inarticulate longing for change.

‡

Jeroun spun slowly at Adrash’s back, thousands upon thousands of leagues distant. The moon, its gaze locked on the darkened world, loomed to his left, closer though by no means near.

Adrash floated before a motionless iron sphere, dwarfed by the wall of one immense rim. Its smooth surface extended in all directions. This close, its curvature could not be discerned. The eye tried and failed to see a furthest edge.

Welded onto its surface was a handle small enough for a large man to grasp with two hands.

Adrash gripped it tightly. He spread his legs, appeared to plant his feet on the nothingness of the void, and pulled. The heavy muscles of his chest and shoulders bunched with the effort, his sinewy torso turned, and slowly the handle moved forward. At the fullest extension of his arms he stepped to the left and repeated the process. In this way, he spun the sphere faster and faster. His body became a blur of frenzied movement.

Eventually, he stopped and drifted back from the wall, the rapidly

approaching edge of which had still not come into view. A comfortable ache suffused his body. Though unnecessary, the exertion had felt good. In the past he had chosen to move the spheres with his mind, but those days were over. It was unsatisfying, somehow. Now he preferred to feel the texture of the metal, the elongation and contraction of muscle tissue.

His body was that of a man, well over two yards tall and coldly beautiful, a marble statue brought to life. But for his eyes—which glowed a harsh yellow-white, lacking iris and pupil—the seamless white material of his armor sheathed him smoothly from crown to sole, hugging the curves of his powerful frame. Broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, he held himself like a professional soldier, spine straight, hands in loose fists. The features of his face were mere suggestions above the strong line of his jaw.

From a greater distance, he regarded the sphere. It had become recognizable as such despite its vast scope. Still farther out, the structure appeared delicate and airy due to the great distance between rims. A decorative bauble, a fragile ornament through which the stars burned. To the sphere’s left, a great distance away, spun its larger brother. To the right, a slightly smaller brother. The others were not yet in sight, and the pale hulking weight of the moon suddenly seemed to loom far too near, as if it were pulling the three spheres into it.

Adrash increased the speed of his retreat. Before long the entire chain of twenty-seven spheres became visible. Positioned halfway down the line, he tried to admire the precision of their placement, their carefully calculated speeds. His last adjustment had guaranteed that once every month the sun’s light would hit the spheres in a particular way, turning the Needle into a line of pale fire in Jeroun’s night sky.

Of course, he would not witness it from orbit.

He considered how few of the world’s inhabitants would notice the effect. Those who did would react by pressing their fists to their heads and praying, or by blotting out the Needle with one hand and cursing.

Both prospects depressed Adrash. Still, he resisted the urge to begin another series of adjustments.

For many hundreds of years, much of his time had been spent altering the positions and speeds of the spheres, an obsessive drive to find the perfect expression of his dissatisfaction. Finding this abstract expression, he believed, would calm him, heal the wounds in his soul. Ultimately, he had grown weary of the monumental effort and returned the spheres to their original alignment, stringing them in a line equidistant to each other, aligned to the moon’s orbit perfectly, and thus narrowing his focus.

The only adjustment he allowed himself now was rotational speed. Once, he had spun the spheres so that each revolution matched exactly for a full year. Four hundred and thirty-two revolutions per hour. One hundred and twenty million times the rims passed before his eyes without any revelation. Then he had slowed down and sped up every other sphere in increasing increments so that the fastest two were at either end and the middle one remained still.

He felt compelled to explore every permutation. Ultimately, he wasted time, distracting himself from the decision he would soon have to make.

Return to Jeroun as mankind’s redeemer, or cleanse the world of mankind forever.

‡

Unfortunately, time had only made the world’s destruction more of an inevitability. Though Adrash had successfully put off the decision for seven thousand years—first by exiling himself above Jeroun, and then by creating the Needle itself—his relationship to the people of the world had not changed.

He could not love mankind, because he saw their brilliance for the thing it was: an exquisitely frail quality that could never make up for the effects of their fear. In fact, more often than not intelligence compounded mankind’s negative tendencies. The aggressive wielded their intellects like weapons to subjugate the humble and the less gifted. Given free reign—and there was little reason to think they would not eventually achieve complete dominion—such men would bury what little virtue remained in the world.

No, he could not forgive men their pettiness, their squabbling, their ridiculous and violent worship. Of course, as a young god he had spent several eons encouraging this behavior, but in truth men had never needed encouraging. How could one change the nature of men? Twenty thousand years of Adrash’s urging—two-thirds of his life, bent to this endeavor—had not made them more peaceful, any likelier to see reason.

Nor, obviously, did the threat of annihilation.

They could not pretend ignorance. Adrash had made his feelings known for millennia. When his words and actions had failed to inspire permanent change, he abandoned mankind for the void. As their empires had grown ever more contentious, he dredged material from the blind side of the moon and constructed the Needle. At the height of their power and hubris, he had hurled the two smallest spheres down, killing hundreds of thousands and blanketing the earth in dust for a decade. The Cataclysm, as men now called it.

These efforts to communicate his desperation had been folly, Adrash now understood. Mankind’s ingenuity in the face of trial was short-lived, and Adrash did not possess the energy to continue reminding them of their priorities. He felt the constant temptation to simply complete what he had begun with the Cataclysm, and send all of his weapons to their task.

You have been too patient
, he told himself.
You have waited on them long enough.

And yet—inexplicably, in the face of all reason—hope remained. When he could stand to hear them, he listened to the thoughts rising from the world below, hoping to hear a call rise above the others and proclaim change. He wondered if his constant adjustments to the Needle of late were an attempt to signal this person, to create a sigil in the sky for a prophet to recognize.

For there had been prophets once, he felt sure: Men and women who had spoken with fearful, exquisite voices—voices that resounded into the bowels of the earth, filled the void with light, and nearly shook Adrash’s heart to a halt.

They had existed, had they not?

Sometimes, Adrash wondered if he had only invented these avatars to keep from going mad.

Sometimes, he wondered if he had prevented madness at all.

Perhaps his obsession revealed the rot that had already spread throughout his soul.

‡

He turned somber eyes away from the Needle and looked upon Jeroun, a bluegreen marble rolling on a sheet of stars. A shallow ocean covered the world but for two small continents straddling opposite sides of the equator: Knoori, the home of man, and Iswee, the perpetually cloud-covered home of the slumbering elders. Everywhere else, uninhabited islands lay scattered like windblown seed.

From experience, Adrash knew the difficulties of navigating between those islands, of traveling from Knoori to Iswee. Mortal men rarely dipped foot in or sailed upon the ocean for fear of its predatory fish and reptiles, but Adrash knew those beasts numbered fairly far down on the list of dangers. Nonetheless, for eons he had preferred to live upon the ocean, where he could be alone, a man instead of a god. But for his armor, which he usually caused to retreat until it was a white helm clinging to his hairless scalp, the sun had shone on his bare black skin.

As the world turned, Knoori rose on its side, a confused mass of sharptoothed mountains, high plains and parched barrens. Cities spotted the continent, a hundred magefire lamps revealing their shapes. Here, Tansot, a five-pointed star of purple radiance. Here, Seous, a blue snake lying alongside River Anets. The sun edged out from behind the world’s swollen belly, unhurriedly extinguishing these fires. For a few seconds Lake Ten turned into a reflecting pool. The pine hills of Nos Ulom became a blanket of jadestones, the deserts of Toma molten gold.

The world was blindingly beautiful.

Adrash could not bear to look any longer. He closed his eyes against the radiance, let the tumblers fall in his mind, and unlocked his soul, allowing the world’s prayers to flood in.

The first to announce itself:
A wordless cry from an imbecilic mind.

The nameless woman called from the unmapped valley in the Aspa Mountains—a place shielded by such deep magic that even Adrash had to concentrate in order to see it from orbit.

He heard the woman’s appeal with such clarity because it was old and familiar to him, but he had little sympathy for the people living along the shore of the ensorcelled lake. The majority of mankind lived in far worse conditions, though most had more variety. The old woman had stumbled onto one of the world’s great secrets and used it to sire a race of idiots. While highly nourishing to bone and muscle tissue, once ingested elder skin acted on the human body like a slow poison, causing prenatal damage and retardation of the brain.

The people of the valley were useless. Adrash ignored their clumsy, aimless prayers, though they were loud. Due to the proximity of so many elders and their ancient buried magics, the valley acted as a focusing lens.

In a lukewarm way, it bothered Adrash to see so much power put to so little. There were times when he wished someone would discover the valley’s secret. The resource would be hoarded and abused, of course, but it would be an interesting development. If it fell into the hands of the Stoli government, Adrash could expect a great deal more traffic in orbit. Dozens—and in time, hundreds, even thousands—of outbound mages would rise from the surface of Jeroun, high on reconstituted elder blood, eager to make names for themselves.

They would come with gifts and weapons, open hands and fingers tipped with magefire. Arcing lightning from one to another as they flew toward the moon, ready to challenge their god or simply beseech him to show compassion.

They would all die, burned to cinders by the light of Adrash’s eyes, crushed to dust in his arms. His palms itched thinking about it. He tightened his fists, remembering the way a man’s blood burst from his body in the void. For a brief moment he even felt the rekindled flame of his youth, a time when he had impulsively aligned himself with this or that leader, capriciously giving vent to his lust for warfare.

No, he had never been a charitable god—not a father or an easer of pain. It would be enjoyable, punishing those who came calling at his door. Nonetheless, he shook the vision of violence from his eyes. Useless conjecture, and ultimately an undesirable development. Best if he never had to look a man in the face again. He let his thoughts drift away from the nameless valley, searching for more encouraging, or at least interesting, voices.