No Return (20 page)

Pol’s mind snapped back into focus, and he dissolved his tether. In ragged order, the others did likewise. Ebn waited for the last of her lieutenants to complete the task, and then allowed the statue to float free.

For what seemed to Pol an eternity, the tableau remained static. Orbiting the radiant god, the mages appeared small and insectile in their black, segmented suits.

The intense light shut off abruptly, scoring the image on Pol’s retinas. He blinked the scene clear to find it changed.

Adrash floated before the immense statue. His sinuous forearms were crossed beneath his broad chest, his head canted forward on his thick neck. Flatfooted, he stood as if upon solid ground. He had positioned himself face to face with the marble figure, and looked down upon the world cradled in its hands. But for the cold luminosity of his eyes, he himself resembled a sculpted object, an artist’s anatomical model flawlessly cast in white stone.

Nonetheless, it struck Pol that Adrash was vastly more beautiful than the statue. He committed to memory every line of the god’s powerful physique. His cock stirred against the tight base layer of his suit, and a tingling radiated into his thighs.

Ebn’s hands flashed again. Pol tore his eyes away from Adrash, but found that he could not read the senior mage’s gestures. Arms pointed at the god, she formed circles before her chest, an arc of crimson flashing briefly between her gauntleted fingers. A spell. Pol watched in shocked fascination as the seams of her suit began to glow at underarm and groin.

Adrash did not so much as twitch in response, but Pol felt the draw of her magic. He fought a compulsion to cross the space to Ebn, to take her in his arms.

She collapsed the spell between her palms.

Adrash’s head now swiveled in her direction. She beckoned to him with signs.

Come here. Come closer.

The mages watched, unmoving, as Adrash turned. He took one step in her direction, two, and started walking toward her slowly, as though he were ascending an invisible staircase. Ebn smiled and spread her hands again. The spell twisted between her fingers, now as black and viscous as clotting blood.

What madness has possessed her?
Pol asked himself. The plan had been simple:
Find Adrash, present the gift, and retreat. Do not deviate from the plan.
Pol had been tasked with moving the statue forward, stabilizing it in orbit above the moon. Though he thought it foolish to approach the god in this manner, he respected the consistency of Ebn’s plan. One did not prostrate with a sword in one’s hand.

This is the death of us all
, Pol thought.

Halfway to Ebn, Adrash stopped and shook his head, for all the world like a man trying to shake an ugly thought from his mind. He turned from her and stretched forth his left arm, pointing his closed fist at the statue. No expression could be read on his masked features.

A tremor passed through Pol’s limbs. Of their own accord, the sigils tattooed on his skin came to life, blooming into twenty-two points of searing agony. The air solidified in his lungs, stopping the scream in his throat. His hearts hiccoughed in his chest and died. For a timeless instant, his bones reverberated an endless note, on the verge of shattering...

As quickly as it had begun, the pain ceased.

The space between his heartbeats dilated: One... Two... Three...

The universe rang as if struck. Pol focused on the sound, sure that if he listened long enough he would hear the words that had originally set the stars in motion, the father of all incantations, the font of all magic. Opening his mouth, he let the sound inside. A warm draught tasting of cinnamon and anise, it rushed dizzyingly to his head, his hands, the twenty-two sigils upon his body. It tingled on his lips, pulsed at the tips of his fingers, begging to be liberated. He held himself at the threshold of release, every nerve singing in ecstasy.

Four... Five... Six.

Too late, he remembered where he was, his duty to the other mages. Too late, he started to cast the spell.

Adrash opened his hand. The statue shattered, and the light of the god’s wrath eclipsed the stars.

THE 22
^nd
OF THE MONTH OF CLERGYMEN TO
THE 11
^th
OF THE MONTH OF PILOTS, 12499 MD
THE STEPS OF STOL, KINGDOM OF STOL

T
hey traveled in relative comfort across the highest Step, averaging nearly twenty-five miles a day. The sparse pine forest suited walking, providing shade and sunlight in equal measures. Even without a trodden path, the ground remained dry and stable. No boulders rose from the earth to trip feet. Numerous small rivers provided fresh water and trout, and lakes allowed them to bathe.

Weather during the Months of Clergymen and Pilots could be unpredictable throughout Stol, yet at the top of the world it was idyllic—neither hot enough to raise a sweat, nor cold enough to chill. In the early afternoon it rained lightly and never for long, leaving the world filled with clean smells. They passed through clouds of black flies, but after a few exploratory bites the insects proved uninterested in human blood.

The tranquility of the land defied the nervousness roiling in Vedas’s gut. They were making good time, but he had not forgotten the day they lost following the mountain cat’s attack. Danoor would not wait for them to be waylaid again.

He was not the only one troubled. The ease of travel ill suited Churls. It made her cranky, suspicious. She held herself ready at all times. Vedas saw it in the tensing of her shoulders, the way her fingers grazed the pommel of her sword.

“Do you think the forest is enchanted?” he asked.

“Possible, I suppose.” She shrugged. “This is nothing like I expected, I’ll grant that. Guess one or two of the tall tales had it right. Whether it’s enchanted makes no difference, though—we have no defense against sorcery, so we’d better just hope it isn’t. Right now I’m less concerned about spells than I am about poison-tipped arrows and axe-wielding mountain men. I know it doesn’t look like that kind of place, but I believe in being prepared.”

She advised Berun and Vedas not to veer too closely to the roughshod villages they glimpsed through the trees. Vedas, having contracted her cautiousness, agreed. Undoubtedly, they were spotted and heard—Berun practically sparkled in sunlight, and he made no attempt to silence his footfalls—but the locals wisely kept their distance.

Only once did someone present himself. On the third day a young boy, short, slightly built, and nearly naked, walked across their path and froze upon sight of the travelers. He looked just as surprised as they were and, without a sound, turned and ran like a rabbit.

Vedas put a hand to Berun’s arm before the constructed man could launch one of his stones. “What are you doing?” he asked. Without consciously urging it to, the edges of his hood closed in around his features.

Berun stared at Vedas’s hand. “The boy may bring others.”

“And so you thought to kill him?”

The constructed man took a step backward. “No.” He looked at Churls and shook his head. “No. I only wanted to incapacitate the boy.”

Churls’s eyes darted to Vedas, and then back to Berun. “Good instinct, but we’d attract more attention knocking the boy out than we would just leaving him be. After all, his people may already know we’re here. If they don’t, nobody’s going to believe his story. A man with black skin and horns, and another man made of metal? Preposterous.”

On the following afternoon, she stopped Vedas from shooting a lone sheep. “I know we’re tired of brook trout,” she said, “but look at how this animal moves. It’s not wild. It’s probably drifted off from the flock, and I’d rather not be caught poaching or get accused of it. Herders treat poachers worse than they treat murderers.”

Impressed by Churls’s quick thinking and watchful air, Vedas began following the path of her gaze. He stilled his steps when she did, tipped his head to the same angle. Gradually, he started to see what she saw, hear what she heard. He learned to identify the region’s ubiquitous signs of inhabitation, both recent and lost to time. A snaking stretch of bare ground became a footpath. Rounded, moss-covered shapes—once indistinguishable to him from natural rock formations—rearranged themselves into extensive ruins that stretched for miles.

Even their route ceased to appear random. Churls nodded when he brought it up, pointing to the paving stones embedded in the roots of the largest trees. Suddenly, as though ordering itself from chaos, the dimensions of the ancient highway became obvious.

It humbled him to realize how blind he had been to this fact. Heightened awareness came with a price, however. The suspicion that they were being watched grew as the days wore on. His skin itched under the gaze of so many unseen eyes. He flinched at birdcalls, ducked under rays of sunlight. He peered over his shoulder and invented figures between the trees. He recognized similar symptoms in Churls, and knew she saw his in turn. Neither spoke of it.

They reached the end of the highest Step without incident. Eager to put distance between themselves and the ghosts inhabiting the top of the world, they continued traveling by the light of the full moon for another two hours. Churls’s arms swung freely at her side. She smiled at Vedas as they set up camp at the edge of the sixteenth Step.

He looked away, struggling to understand why the expected release had not occurred. Certainly, he continued to obsess over their schedule. He worried about chartering a ship across Lake Ten. And in only a few days’ time, they would be traveling in the Apusht Vales. The people of the valleys, traditionally the stronghold of Stoli Adrashism, defended their border from the Anadrashi people of Toma. They would not look kindly upon Vedas or Berun.

For the first time since the night the cat attacked, Vedas gave these concerns a voice, holding forth like a man confessing his sins. He regretted the decision instantly, yet felt powerless to stop himself.

“We must catch a ship on the day we arrive...

“If we’re not on Knosi soil by this date...

“We can’t expect to travel as fast at night...

“I can’t imagine what Abse would say to me if he knew...”

They had been over it all before, on many occasions. He had kept the debate going long after deferring to her better judgment.

Shut your mouth
, he told himself—and finally, he did.

The millstone around his neck was no lighter. In the silence that followed, he considered what might be done to negate the words he had just spoken, and arrived at no solution.

Berun grunted. “I’ve heard these things before.”

Churls sighed, obviously displeased to have her good mood sullied. “I thought we were through with this argument, too, but I guess you need one more go-round. We’re making the best time we can, Vedas. We’ll deal with Lake Ten when Lake Ten is in front of us. As for the Apusht, you’re right. It’s home to some of the most dangerous men in Stol. But it’s a short walk compared to what we’ve traveled so far. We’ll move at night. The border guard are warriors, not mages. While it won’t be a stroll to the butcher’s, at least we know what to expect.”

Vedas closed his eyes, shamed by her self-control. She had not lashed out, as was her right. Rather, she had explained matters to him as if to a child.

She would not have to do it again, he vowed. Experience had confirmed the soundness of her judgment, had it not? She had proved herself more knowledgeable than Vedas and Berun combined. If she believed they would make it through unscathed, they would.

Reason failed to alleviate the weight pressing down upon Vedas’s shoulders. He massaged the tight muscles over his ribs, trying to ease the tension constricting each breath. Filled with the awareness that he had not spoken his true concern—that he could not in fact identify the source of his disquiet—he stared beyond the fire, unable to shake the conviction that something had followed him down from the highest Step.

‡

Long after Churls had fallen asleep, he lay awake, exhausted yet unable to still his thoughts. A familiar condition. As he had done every night since the cat attacked Churls, he replayed the event in his mind, imagining all the ways it could have ended badly.

All the ways he could have failed.

When sleep finally came, it offered no release. Churls perished again and again, her throat in the cat’s teeth or her chest opened by its claws. Held back by invisible hands, he could do nothing to help. He watched her fall beneath the beast’s weight and tumble over the edge of the world, only to rise again and succumb to another violent death.

He jolted out of the nightmare every time she turned in her slumber. Stilling his galloping heart, he listened for a sound, anything out of the ordinary.

This is pointless
, he thought.
She doesn’t need me worrying over her
.

Knowing this to be true—indeed, that she would consider his concern an insult—for two weeks he had hidden the signs of his distress. He remained still throughout the night so as not to alert Berun, and pushed beyond his fatigue from sunrise to sunset. He never mentioned the pain that lingered in his jaw where the cat had struck him. The joint clicked softly when he chewed his food, ached like a rotten tooth before every rain, and throbbed when he worried.