Zachary Jernigan: No Return

The hallway was long. It did not slope upward, yet Berun found he needed to lean forward slightly in order to reach the nondescript doorway at its end.

The mage looked up at him expectantly. Berun knocked.

The door opened easily and the hallway disappeared. The sun hung in a cloudless sky. Berun and the mage stood on a vast field of short yellow grass sparsely blanketed with blooming azure flowers. Before them, the horizon was flat and somewhat close. Berun swiveled his head to look behind and found the same view. To either side, however, the horizon seemed to draw to a point a great distance away. It seemed they stood on the top of an immense wall.

He looked down. At his feet a fat man slept, dressed all in white. As with the mage, Berun recognized but could not place him.

“Kill him,” the mage said. His eyes had become large, liquid pools of amber in which two doubled irises swam. Two figure eights lying on their sides.

“Why?” Berun asked. Without consciously deciding to do so, he knelt before the sleeping man and reached for his neck. He had not thought of his shattered right arm in some time, and the sight of it surprised him.

“One hand should be enough, Berun,” the mage said.

Hearing his name spoken broke the spell. The artifice of the vision sloughed off like a layer of dust, and Berun became aware of his body on the rooftop in Butchertown. He knew the heat of the sun there, a very real sensation that split his worlds in two. All at once, the link between waking life and vision felt very tenuous. Berun regarded the body of Patr Macassel, then stood and turned to the mage.

“Father,” he said. “Where am I?”

The mage Ortur Omali smiled. Deep within Berun’s chest a sphere knocked against its neighbors.

“Wrong question,” Omali said. “You should ask, ‘Where am I to go?’”

Berun stared at his creator. The man had aged.

Realization struck. “You’re really you,” Berun said.

Omali’s smile broadened. “Inconsequential. Ask me where you’re supposed to go, Berun.”

Confused, full of questions, Berun nonetheless obliged.

“Danoor,” Omali said.

“Why?”

Omali inclined his head to the man at Berun’s feet. Macassel had disappeared, replaced by a tall, strongly built man. He wore a black elder-skin suit, but its surface shifted on him like oil, revealing patches of skin that varied from light to dark. One moment, the pink paleness of an Ulomi miner. Next, the rich oilwood brown of a Knosi fisherman. He grew. He shrunk. Twice, his suit took on the hue of milk and his skin turned black.

Berun looked up. The great mage’s form blinked on and off. For a moment, his entire body appeared out of focus. An intense frown of concentration scored deep lines in his face. He caught Berun’s questioning look.

“I cannot quite find the focus now, but he is here somewhere. He does not invite others in. Perhaps—” His steel hand shook as it rose to his mouth and pried his lips apart. He yawned as if the muscles of his jaw were sore. “Ah. I have found him again. For all his resistance, he is nearly as open as you are, Berun. His alignment is unclear, however. I cannot yet make a decision about him. Soon, though. Soon. But that does not concern you. Your mission is simple: You will watch him, and await my command.”

“Who?” Berun asked.

Omali blinked out of existence again, and reappeared after a handful of seconds. The man at Berun’s feet did the same. Suddenly, the view Berun had of the street in Butchertown superimposed itself over everything. It blinked on and off. The vision started to fade around Berun.

“Who?” he asked again. “Tell me, Father.”

Omali shook his head, frowned. He started to speak, stopped. For a brief moment, he had no mouth, just a smooth layer of skin below his nose. After several false starts, he finally spoke in a voice that grated like a whetstone against a rusty steel blade.

“A man who will upset the balance. He is—”

Before any more could be said, the vision ended.

‡

“My father has summoned me on an errand,” Berun told the abbey master. “I must go to Danoor.”

Nhamed looked up from his meal. He dipped his chopsticks in the steel cleansing cup and positioned them precisely on his napkin. The dinner items were arranged before him carefully, aligned so that each complemented its neighbor. He ran hands over thighs and stomach, as though seeking to brush invisible crumbs from him. He sighed, eyes roving around the nearly empty room, landing everywhere but on Berun.

Berun did not mind the wait. The master was an interesting man to observe. He projected an air of tense, even awkward fastidiousness inside the walls of the abbey, which clashed oddly with the wild zeal he displayed in battle.

“Explain,” Nhamed eventually said.

Berun described the vision, the details of which had not faded, but cemented themselves in his mind. When he looked inward, he could recall the events as if they had occurred in the abbey the day previously.

Nhamed’s eyes stared fixedly above Berun’s head. “To my knowledge, your creator is dead. You think a dream enough to leave the city? There are men who will remember your name along the road.” He furrowed his brow. “Men who... Men who will not be friendly.”

“I know this,” Berun said. “And yes, it’s enough.”

Strangely, it was. Despite his youth, Berun was not naïve. Omali had never appeared to him before, but it explained why Berun had recently experienced visions with such regularity. Surely, Omali had caused them for a reason. Perhaps this trust itself proved that his creator had programmed him for certain behavior, but Berun was not generally given to flights of speculation.

Besides, he surmised, there would be fighting in Danoor. To celebrate the new year, the city had scheduled a secular tournament to follow the contest between the Black and White orders. That alone was reason to go. For a moment, he questioned why the trip had not occurred to him before.

Nhamed’s eyes finally found Berun’s. “Then we will miss you. Will you...” The master cleared his throat delicately. “Will you return? We have grown fond of you, and the White Suits...”

Berun caught his meaning. “I will return,” he said. “And I will bring money.” Nhamed raised his eyebrows and made a noncommittal sound. Berun assumed the man would not try to stop him, but he had misjudged people before. Men, he knew, often hid their intentions from themselves. They made decisions without knowing why.

“Well,” Nhamed finally said. “If you insist upon leaving, I have just received word of another man’s journey to Danoor. Golna’s champion has been chosen.” A sour expression crossed his face. He moved his lips, apparently searching for words. “He is, I know, a man of honor. I have never trusted his master, but I do not doubt his charge. It will be safer to travel with him. He may even protect you.”

Berun refrained from laughing. “Who is he?”

‡

The abbey masters had arranged for Berun and his traveling companion to meet the following morning at the Tam Docks in Heblast, the westernmost neighborhood in Golna. Impatient to get moving, Berun arrived early and attempted to distract himself by watching the fishermen unload the night’s catch from their flat-bottomed riverboats. In quick time, butcher stalls were erected. Chum buckets overflowed. Restaurant and foodstall owners filled the boardwalk, straining past their neighbors to offer money for the best cuts.

Nhamed had given Berun a description of Vedas Tezul, but he disregarded it. He would not search the crowd for a particular face. Like Ulomi men, Knosi all looked the same to him. Most likely, it would be some time before he was able to differentiate Vedas from his countrymen. It made far more sense for the man to find Berun.