Zachary Jernigan - No Return

The constructed man looked from Vedas to the boy and back again. “Why did you do this? And why have you covered your face?”

“The boy was sick. Dropma Fever. I fear I might have contracted it.” Vedas held his hands out from his hips, afraid to touch the rest of his body. He possessed little practical knowledge of disease. “I think my suit will protect me, but I won’t be sure for a few days.”

Berun shrugged, apparently unconcerned.

“I’d like to wash myself,” Vedas said. “Did you see any water ahead?”

“A creek runs across the road a few miles from here.”

Vedas washed himself as best he could. They began walking again.

Two day later, they crested a rise and saw the three-hundred-foot slopes of Dalan Fele.

Berun appeared unimpressed. He had seen it several times.

Vedas remembered it only dimly from childhood. He breathed shallowly from lungs that felt stuffed with cotton, tried to take in the scope of the wall rising over the tallest trees and disappearing to view on either side, and collapsed.

‡

The memory of being carried, swaying from side to side, cradled in rocksolid arms. The sun in his eyes, then shadow overtaking. A wall stretching above him. The wall falling, rising, falling again, a gigantic door. Two glowing blue orbs, hovering in the air. A cold, brassy voice repeating his name. More voices, yelling, echoing on stone. The whisper of canvas. Warm light suffusing, the world organizing itself. Tent poles. Being laid on a soft surface. Blackness. A new voice.

Focusing on the voice, rising up through layers of pain.

Vedas woke, and found that he could not scream.

“The suit should have protected him,” a man told Berun. “That is, if he wore the mask the entire time.” He adjusted his spectacles and stared up at the immense man of brass standing silently before him. “Did he wear the mask the entire time?”

“I wasn’t there and he didn’t tell me,” Berun answered. “Can he see us right now?”

The man leaned over Vedas. He filled a tiny plunger on the bedside table and moistened Vedas’s eyes. Once opened, they seemed unwilling to close.

“I don’t know,” the man—a doctor, Vedas belatedly surmised—said.

“Will he die?”

The doctor swallowed and looked down at Vedas again. “I don’t know that either. He’s still in the intermediate phase of the disease, which is good. Receiving the spell before the fever breaks increases his chances of recovery considerably. If the spell doesn’t cure him, though, and his fever breaks, he’ll only have a few days before the disease destroys his mind, turning him into an animal. Death will follow soon after.”

“Is that why you’ve bound him?”

The doctor lifted his hand from the leather wrist strap it rested upon. “Yes. I can’t predict when the fever will break, it happens so suddenly. He could be dangerous.”

Struggling to focus on the conversation, Vedas’s mind swam through a fog of heated torment. Every breath was agony, as if someone were holding a live coal against his ribs. The pulse throbbed in his head, a rhythmic pressure that compressed his eyeballs and sinuses. Every muscle in his head and neck ached with tension, and he could not unclench his jaw. His limbs did not pain him, but their numb unresponsiveness was troubling.

He saw the world through thick, milky glass. He could neither move nor close his eyes. When the doctor moistened them, his vision cleared only a little.

“Why haven’t you unclothed him?” Berun asked. “Won’t he be too hot?”

Vedas’s heart threw itself against his sore ribs. He tried to move, to open his mouth or at least moan. He had not removed his suit in two decades. Only his head, anus, and the tip of his penis touched open air. He had heard of others removing their suits from time to time, but the Thirteenth taught that true connection with one’s suit could only be achieved through constant contact. The thought of a stranger removing it, touching its inner surface, filled him with rage so strong it sang in his bones.

The doctor sighed. “No. Even though I live in Nbena, I’m not a fool. I used to live in Ulias, where I worked on a number of suited men. I know how elder-cloth works. Look.” He laid a hand on Vedas’s chest. “Do you feel that? How cold it is?”

Berun scowled. “Hot and cold mean nothing to me.”

The doctor cleared his throat. “Ah. Then you’ll have to trust me. Your friend has a deep connection with his suit. In a way, it knows what he needs and is trying to provide it to him. Without the suit, I suspect his fever would already have broken. Either that, or he would be dead.”

Berun shifted from foot to foot, the spheres of his body whispering against each other. “You won’t let him die.”

“I have very little say in the matter,” the doctor said. “And you haven’t paid me.”

An odd sound, like marbles being rubbed together in a child’s hand, came from within Berun’s body. A moment later, a box composed of small spheres emerged from his stomach. He plucked it free and it collapsed in his hand, revealing a collection of multicolored bags. He selected one and passed it over Vedas’s body to the doctor.

The man held the bag up to the skylight. “This is good for half.”

Berun selected another. “I thought I was being generous with the first.”

The doctor met the constructed man’s stare. “That was generous last year.”

“You won’t let him die,” Berun said again.

The doctor shook his head wearily, slipped both bags of bonedust into his vest pocket, and turned to the bedside table. He returned with an ampoule of amber liquid, and broke it open. Vedas distantly felt the doctor’s fingers as they peeled his lips back from his clenched teeth and poured the liquid down. He did not taste the spell or feel it trickling into his throat.

The smell of iron did reach his nose, and quickly overcame his senses. A shutter closed over his eyes, leaving him in complete darkness. The pain shut off suddenly. Vedas found himself alone in his mind, unable to sense his body. He drifted, untethered. No eyes, no ears, no nose—nothing. For a timeless moment, he was not a man. Maybe the spell had banished him to a far ashen corner of his mind so that it might work on the disease. Maybe the spell was not in fact working, and now he simply waited for his body to stop functioning.

Berun’s last words came to him without a voice: You won’t let him die. The phrase repeated over and over again, confounding in his current state, neither dead nor alive. You won’t let him die. You won’t let him die.

Suddenly, light burst through cracks in the shutter before his eyes and he found himself back in his body. A scorching needle bit into his mind and set his skin aflame. Every joint in his body cracked at once. He screamed, arching up from the mattress, straining at the straps that bound him. Hard, cold hands the size of shields pressed him down. Someone else pressed a wet rag to his forehead. As the sedative spell contained therein seeped into his skin, he felt the overwhelming urge to shut his eyes. His eyelids dragged closed, burning like sore muscles being stretched.

His screams became words.

“Take me home!” he yelled.

“Take me home!” he rasped.

“Take me home,” he whispered before falling into unconsciousness.

‡

In the warm interior of the doctor’s tent, Vedas drifted in and out of sleep. Dreams weaved around him, meshing fluidly with waking moments. A large man of gold rubble stood beside his bed, fell to the ground, rose in the body of the fever-mad young man he had killed on the road to Nbena, and then shrank to become a young girl with a black sash tied around her left arm. A candle wavered before his eyes. The flame dropped upon him, engulfing him without heat or pain. Someone spoke his name, and Vedas recognized his own voice, his father's or mother’s voice, Abse’s voice—droning, becoming music.