Zachary Jernigan - No Return

Pol pictured Shav, wrapped tight around the sky-hook, trusting in his pet’s grip, shouting words of tamer lore and encouragement. As the air grew thinner, the spell the quarterstock had imbibed before calling the beast down supplied more and more oxygen to his body. He did not breathe in at all. Drawing in the cold would freeze his lungs instantly.

With greater height, sound itself began to fail. In his mind’s eye, Pol saw Shav climbing the wyrm’s legs and flank, shimmying up its long neck, straddling its giant head so that he might whisper directions into its ear. When his voice could no longer be heard, the violently shivering tamer crushed another spell against the wyrm’s skull and pressed his ear to the wet scales, freezing the two beings together, forming a seal.

Tamer and wyrm’s thoughts meshed and became one.

If the animal allowed, that is.

Even then it was a tenuous link, Pol knew, though he did not understand the process exactly. In the half-month since he had taken Shav as a lover, he had picked up more tamer lore than the guild normally allowed to outsiders. Still, he was far from conversant. Strictly speaking, he had no desire to be.

He knew without question that Ebn had made no study of their lore. If she had done so, her plan might not rely upon a madman and his unpredictable charge.

Pol considered the odd coincidence of Shav’s appearance. Though not by nature a paranoid man, he could not avoid wondering how it was that Ebn had started looking for a tamer at nearly the exact moment of Pol’s meeting one. Shav himself had expressed a similar sentiment. An odd confluence, surely, yet in Pol’s experience such things often occurred without anyone’s arrangement.

But coincidence or no, he could not ignore the potential in such a meeting of fates. He would turn it to his advantage by remaining vigilant, open to possibilities as they arose. The more connected he became to the world—the less like his timid peers, cloistered behind the walls of the academy—the better he would be able to mold events to suit his needs.

Fear is not an attribute of Adrash , Pol reminded himself. It will not be one of mine .

Ebn’s spell pushed the mages farther and farther apart as gravity lost its hold, until their bodies spun nearly horizontal to the distant ground. The fiery tether binding them to the wyrm had faded to nothing in the rarified atmosphere, as Ebn had told them it would, making it difficult to see one another. The mages signed excitedly over their helmets nonetheless.

Pol did not partake in the simple conversation. Yes, he knew the plan. Yes, he knew his role. In the last month, Ebn had conducted thirteen briefings. If her officers did not yet know what must be done, they never would.

A quick and effortless spell, and Pol knew they had reached an altitude of almost twenty-three miles. Another hour, very likely.

Soon thereafter, Ebn would see the error of her conviction. Adrash had no interest in receiving supplicants, and even less interest in gifts. What need did a god have for baubles when he could cause steel monuments to rise from the moon itself? If the stories of Adrash were true—if seclusion had not turned the god into a shadow of himself—he would see their groveling as the insult it was, and react accordingly.

In Pol’s estimation, the chances of the outbound mages returning to Jeroun were slim.

He sighed. Having made preparations for the worst, there was nothing left to do but wait.

He closed his eyes and considered the riddle of Shav again.

‡

The way his bulk occupied the small apartment near the docks, filling it so that it seemed he could not move without breaking something. Yet move he did. In private, Shav possessed an awareness of his outsized body that shocked Pol. Such poise could rarely be learned. Clearly, he affected clumsiness while fighting to trick his opponents.

Uncharacteristically and in opposition to the obvious hierarchy of species, Pol found himself intimidated by the quarterstock.

But it was not merely Shav’s physical prowess that put Pol off balance. That the quarterstock was mad could not be denied. The sickness revealed itself primarily through his eyes, which stared through Pol more often than not, focused on images in his own mind. Sometimes his hands shook and his lips moved as though he were having a silent conversation. Slight tremors moved through him, often causing his whole body to vibrate like a tuning fork.

At times his madness bloomed into something else—something far beyond the bounds of mental imbalance, bordering on the mystical. While he slept, he spoke in different tongues.

Pol heard their cadence and rhythm and knew them to be true languages, though he recognized none of the words. His curiosity had compelled him to capture several of the monologues in acoustic jars and show them to a colleague in ancient languages. The man, obviously excited by what he heard, practically demanded to know where Pol had procured the recordings. Pol, unwilling to reveal his source, had walked away, little the wiser.

This was not all. On several trancelike occasions Shav had seemed to shift into another persona, changing tone, pitch, and vocabulary so completely that Pol wondered if the quarterstock were not in fact inhabited by other personalities. He had heard such things were possible.

Of course, he knew not to probe Shav too obviously. As their relationship developed, the quarterstock had revealed a deep, incisive intelligence, voiced in ever more sophisticated speech. Recently, he had begun to reveal troublingly precise insights into Pol’s mind. He seemed to possess an instinctive clairvoyance, and as a result Pol no longer knew what to hide and what to reveal. The quarterstock seemed possessed of faculties reason could not explain.

These traits both repelled and attracted Pol. Shav was important, somehow—even if only because Pol willed it so. He had pursued Shav intuitively, unsure of his own motives, and the quarterstock seemed to be responding in kind. Like opponents in a game of yhor, they danced half-blind around one another, trying to peer at the other’s pieces.

“You have a plan for me,” Shav had told him the last time they met—undoubtedly, their most troubling conversation yet.

Pol finished his honey and saffron flatbread slowly, considering. A direct response seemed best. “Obviously I do, Shav. Beyond physical pleasure, I want to understand your hybrid nature. We have talked about it many times. My intentions are no mystery.”

“No, Pol.” The hybrid’s thick fingers folded the bread around the spiced dates expertly. “That’s not what I mean. I’m good at reading faces, and yours says you’re hiding things from me. Things beyond pleasure and breeding. It’s fine for now if you want to hide. I’ll eventually figure it out, with or without your help.”

Pol felt an all-too-familiar moment of paranoia, and quickly reviewed their conversation to make sure he had not revealed anything he had not meant to. He opened his mouth, sure of words to come.

“Don’t,” Shav said. “Denying it won’t do any good. I’ve contacted a linealogist at your academy, and he confirmed my suspicions. A drop of blood or semen will answer all of your questions about my heritage. You have access to both. Of course, you would still need a linealogist to perform the spells, and then your study would be public. Somehow, I gather that isn’t part of your plan. The linealogist was quite eager to know your name.”

Pol’s hearts beat harder. To be caught pursuing another guild’s lore could land him in some trouble. The fact that he had no intention of casting linealogical spells would make no difference. If the administration searched deep enough, they might even discover that he had been pursuing his own unregistered research with illegally acquired alchemicals. The academy, which inherited any documents of magical innovation upon a mage’s death, considered such illicit practices acts of sedition against Stol, punishable by death.