Zachary Jernigan - No Return

The spheres of his knuckles spun, and a new sensation struck him:

Pounding. Fists beating on an immense door within himself. Ortur Omali, struggling to be free, to assert his will once more—to disprove Berun’s recent victory over him. The reverberations shook Berun, rattling him to the core. For several seconds he feared he might fly apart, and then two voices spoke at once:

Berun , his father said, speaking with the sound of a thousand trees being ripped from the earth, tugging his creation away from the real world. Black spots—shadow moths, flakes of ash—swam before his eyes, obscuring his vision.

“Berun,” Churls said, tugging in the opposite direction. Away from madness.

She spoke his name a second time.

It was enough, barely, another near-defeat. The hex dissolved inside him, and the smoky interior of the inn snapped into focus around him. His joints sagged. He gripped the back of a chair to steady himself, and the wood shattered in his fingers.

Sound ceased in the room. The man at the table before Berun showed teeth, put a hand to the hilt of the dagger strapped horizontally on his stomach. His companion’s fist tightened around the handle of a heavy mug. The bartender ducked behind his counter briefly, and rose with two cocked crossbows. Instead of arrowheads, both bolts were tipped with ampoules: magic enough to hurt a constructed man, perhaps.

“Sorry,” Berun said, brass voice loud in the crowded room. He straightened slowly, careful not to bump his head on the low ceiling. Talk started up again. The drummer and tambourine player resumed their soft rhythm, and the bartender put his weapons away.

Churls clapped a hand to Berun’s broad back. “Congratulations on not attracting attention to yourself.” She spoke loudly enough for him alone to hear. “And so much for a month of peace. What the hell happened there?”

Berun navigated the tables and chairs slowly, glad for a moment to think. He had not told Churls of his father’s appearances, of course—but now that Vedas was out of earshot, he seriously considered doing so. He searched for resistance, and found none. Perhaps Omali could not rouse the energy after another failure.

What could be the harm? Churls might have something to say.

A server, clothed in a single fold of carmine cloth clasped at the neck, waited for them at a free table in the back corner. She swayed in time to the hypnotic beat, alternately exposing and covering her nakedness. Berun peered around and realized that, but for the servers, Churls was the only woman present. The men stared at her hungrily, causing the anger to flare inside him again. He clamped down on the emotion, suspecting now that his father could use it as a doorway.

He pulled a chair out and knelt on the floor. Still, he loomed over the table.

“Coffee and hash,” Churls said to the server, who sashayed away.

Anticipating her question again, Berun held his hands up, palms forward. “I don’t know.” He reconsidered the lie. He trusted Churls. “That’s not true. My father speaks to me in dreams. Sometimes, I’m fully awake. I think he wants me to kill Vedas, but I don’t know if he’s sure about this. He spoke to me, just a moment ago.”

Her eyebrows rose fractionally. “Isn’t Omali dead? No, that’s not important. Are you going to kill Vedas?”

He admired the way she asked the question, as though she were asking about a cut of meat, no tiptoeing around the issue. “No,” he answered. “I’m not going to kill him. I like him. Since his decision to rewrite the speech, I like him even more. The world already has enough killing in the name of Adrash. Besides, a riot would delay the real tournament.”

The corners of Churls’s mouth turned down. Not for the first time, Berun wondered if they would end up fighting in the same bracket. Would she drop out if this were the case? He hoped so, for he could not imagine taking her life.

“You like him, too?” he asked.

“Shit.” She groaned and leaned onto her forearms. “What the hell’s wrong with him? What the hell’s wrong with me? I’d like to chalk it up to old age, but I don’t feel that old. Sure, I like him. I have goddamn dreams about him. The kind I haven’t had for two decades. And what do I get for my obsession? Next to nothing. He ignores me and I’m nervous as a fucking newborn deer around him.”

The way she spoke of herself awed Berun. Despite her uneasy interactions with Vedas, he had not expected it from her. Of all the people he had ever met, she possessed the keenest, most self-assured mind.

Surely, the Black Suit was to blame for the awkwardness between them.

“He looks at you often. You don’t see that?”

She grimaced. “Of course I do. So what if he looks at my ass? A man staring at your ass means nothing. He doesn’t talk to me like a man talks to a woman. Outside of our sparring sessions, he flinches at the slightest touch. And even if he didn’t, how would I respond? He’s a religious fanatic sealed in a suit he probably hasn’t removed in years. Beyond the logistical problems, that fact means something. I don’t like fanatics. My parents were fanatics. My sister’s a fanatic.”

“And what about the speech? He wants to change it. He asked for help. This means nothing to you?”

“Orrus Dabil Alachum,” she swore. “You’ve thought things through, haven’t you, Berun? In truth, I don’t know how to account for any of this. Until the night he tussled with the Baleshuuk slave, I thought he was one person. Now I think he might be another. You told me I see something in him, but the truth is I don’t know what I see. Most of the time I wish I’d never met him. Then I just wish he’d—”

The server returned, and Churls made her expression blank. She tapped the server’s wrist with her index fingertip, and said in a low voice, “There’s a gram extra if you can give me some information. We need a boat to Ynon. Doesn’t matter what size, but it has to be reputable, and it has to leave soon.”

“Reputable?” the server asked slowly. Her green eyes, which had appeared glassy and unfocused a moment before, darted from Churls to Berun. “I do not know what you mean by this word.”

“Flags,” Churls said. “It must sail under flags. No mongrels.”

The server nodded. “How soon is soon?”

“A day, two at most.”

Churls’s eyes followed the woman through the crowd. She stared at her mug, at the ceiling, anywhere but at Berun. She picked at her food and he kept quiet, respecting her mood, and eventually a man approached the table with an offer.

‡

They exited the inn. Churls squinted into the sun. “I don’t want to go back yet.”

Berun nodded, and they walked along the shore, away from the docks. He admired the way the sunlight glinted off the waves, the sound of gulls screaming. He imagined what it might be like to smell things. Men always commented upon the smell of water. He considered asking Churls if she would mind if he took a stroll under the glass clear shallows, but rejected the thought. At that moment, she possessed a fragility incomprehensible to him.

She loves Vedas , he thought. Love, too, was unfathomable.

“Even with flags, it’s not always safe,” she said after some time. “Pirates sail these waters. Maybe our luck will run out on the lake.” She squinted into the sun. “Sometimes I think that’s what Vedas wants. A big fist to come out of the sky and smash him. A confirmation that fate’s aligned against him.”

“Maybe.” Berun sensed she had more to say, and waited for it.

“I’ve read the speech,” she eventually said.

“I know.” He found a flat stone and pitched it hard enough that it was lost to sight long before it stopped skipping. He came upon two large rocks halfsubmerged in the sand, and picked them up. He turned in a circle, and then laughed his brass laugh. “Look around us, Churls. In an ocean of sand and small stones, these two rocks. Rough around the edges, ready to be turned into weapons.” He began spinning them in his hands, grinding them down.